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William Cobbett

66 quotes

“However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1794 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter, Philadelphia, to Rachel Smithers (6 July 1794), published in The Autobiography of William Cobbett: The Progress of a Plough-boy to a Seat in Parliament, ch. 5, p. 57 (1933)
“A man of all countries is a man of no country: and let all those citizens of the world remember, that he who has been a bad subject in his own country...will never be either trusted or respected.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1794 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Observations on Priestley's Emigration’ (August 1794), Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of America, Volume I (1801), p. 169
“After this, who will say that an Englishman ought not to despise “all the nations of Europe?” For my part I do, and that most “heartily.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1797 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Porcupine's Gazette (December 1797), Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of America, Volume VII (1801), p. 428
“All that I can boast of in my birth, is, that I was born in Old England.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As to politics, we were like the rest of the country people in England; that is to say, we neither knew nor thought any thing about the matter.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But I do not remember ever having seen a newspaper in the house; and, most certainly, that privation did not render us less industrious, happy, or free.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate in adhering to an opinion once adopted.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I would have these good people to recollect, that the laws of this country hold out to foreigners an offer of all that liberty of the press which Americans enjoy, and that, if this liberty be abridged, by whatever means it may be done, the laws and the constitution, and all together, is a mere cheat; a snare to catch the credulous and enthusiastic of every other nation; a downright imposition on the world.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1800 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Porcupine's Gazette, No. 799 (13 January 1800)
“Marat was a chemist, Le Bon a lawyer, Collet d'Herbois a player, and not one of them a bull-baiter, I dare be sworn.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1802 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William Windham (5 January 1802), quoted in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America: Volume I (1913), p. 146
“When, from the top of any high hill, one looks round the country, and sees the multitude of regularly distributed spires, one not only ceases to wonder that order and religion are maintained, but one is astonished that any such thing as disaffection or irreligion should prevail.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1688 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William Windham (27 May 1802), quoted in J. C. D. Clark, English Society. 1688-1832. Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (1985), pp. 89-90
“The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom...have been thrust out of all public employment...a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1802 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (10-17 July 1802), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (1990), p. 8
“Nothing is so well calculated to produce a death-like torpor in the country as an extended system of taxation and a great national debt.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1804 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter (10 February 1804)
“There is a Bill before the House of Commons which, under disguise, is intended to eradicate boxing, bull-baiting, and everything that Mr. Bowles, or his coadjutor Mr. Perceval, chooses to call a misdemeanour. I have not time to communicate what I wish to say; but I have the Bill here, and, if you will be so good as to call any time to-day or to-morrow, I will point out the danger. There is no time to be lost; because I dare say that this Bill, which goes to the rearing of puritanism into a system, would, if you did not lay hold of it, pass unnoticed.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1804 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to William Windham (2 May 1804), quoted in Lewis Melville, The Life and Letters of William Cobbett in England and America: Volume I (1913), pp. 205–6
“What, for instance, induced me, when so far distant from my country, voluntarily to devote myself to her cause? Her commerce? I neither knew nor cared any thing about it. Her funds? I was so happy as hardly to understand the meaning of the word. Her lands? I could, alas! lay claim to nothing but the graves of my parents.—What, then, was the stimulus? What was I proud of? It was the name and fame of England. Her laws, her liberties, her justice, her might; all the qualities and circumstances that had given her renown in the world, but above all her deeds in arms, her military glory.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1804 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (27 October 1804)
“The profession of arms is always the most honourable.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1805 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 199
“I have always said, that, without commerce...this island could not possibly continue to be great...but, it is the system of rendering every thing commercial; of making merchants and bankers into Lords; of making a set of fund-dealers the distributors of honours and rewards...it is this system that I reprobate.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1806 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (11 January 1806), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (1990), p. 15
“I cannot...perceive any ground for hoping that any practical good would, while the funding system exists in its present extent, result from the adoption of any of those projects, which have professed to have in view what is called Parliamentary Reform...when the funding system, from whatever cause, shall cease to operate upon civil and political liberty, there will be no need of projects for parliamentary reform. The parliament will, as far as shall be necessary, then reform itself.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1806 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (15 March 1806), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (1990), p. 11
“The very hirelings of the press, whose trade it is to buoy up the spirits of the people … have uttered falsehoods so long, they have played off so many tricks, that their budget seems, at last, to be quite empty.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1812 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Last Ten Years,” Political Register (4 January 1812)
“We want great alteration, but we want nothing new.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1816 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (2 November 1816), pp. 454–55
“Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs...have usurped a large part of the soil.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1816 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (21 December 1816), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (1990), p. 31
“Never will I own as my friend him who is not a friend of the people of England. I will never become a Subject or a Citizen in any other state, and will always be a foreigner in every country but England. ... [M]y beloved Countrymen, be you well assured, that the last beatings of that heart will be, love for the people, for the happiness and the renown of England; and hatred of their corrupt, hypocritical, dastardly and merciless foes.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1817 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Mr. Cobbett's Taking Leave of His Countrymen (28 March 1817), pp. 30–31
“It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1817 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Mr. Benbow,” Political Register (29 November 1817)
“I say...upon this point, what JUDGE BLACKSTONE says; and that is, that the right to resist oppression always exists, but that those who compose the nation at any given time must be left to judge for themselves when oppression has arrived at a pitch to justify the exercise of such right.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1818 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘To the Freemen of Coventry’, Political Register (4 April 1818), p. 404
“What did Brandreth do more than was done by the Whigs at the Revolution?”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1818 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘Letter X to John Cartwright’, Political Register (26 December 1818), p. 427
“To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1819 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: To Parson Malthus,” Political Register (8 May 1819)
“All my plans in private life; all my pursuits; all my designs, wishes, and thoughts, have this one great object in view: the overthrow of the ruffian Boroughmongers. If I write grammars; if I write on agriculture; if I sow, plant, or deal in seeds; whatever I do has first in view the destruction of those infamous tyrants.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1819 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (14 August 1819), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (1990), p. 18
“Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nouns of number, or multitude, such as Mob, Parliament, Rabble, House of Commons, Regiment, Court of King's Bench, Den of Thieves, and the like.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Born amongst husbandmen, bred to husbandry, delighting in its pursuits even to the minutest details, never having, in all my range through life, lost sight of the English farm-house and of those scenes in which my mind took its first spring, it is natural that I should have a strong partiality for a country life, and that I should enter more in detail into the feelings of labourers in husbandry than into those of other labourers.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1821 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘To Mr. Attwood’, Political Register (5 May 1821), p. 343
“But what is to be the fate of the great wen of all? The monster, called, by the silly coxcombs of the press, "the metropolis of the empire"?”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1822 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cobbett's Weekly Political Register (5 January 1822)
“Good government is known from bad government by this infallible test: that under the former the labouring people are well fed and well clothed, and under the latter, they are badly fed and badly clothed.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1823 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register, XLVI, pp. 513-514 (31 May 1823)
“As to the power which money gives, it is that of brute force, it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet, and of the bribed press, tongue and pen.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honoured by the name of “speculation”; but which ought to be called Gambling.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women are a sisterhood. They make common cause in behalf of the sex; and, indeed, this is natural enough, when we consider the vast power that the law gives us over them.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[T]he very best and most virtuous of all mankind, the agricultural labourers of this land, so favoured by God Almighty, and for so many ages the freest and happiest country in the world!”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1831 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘To the Labourers of England, on their duties and their rights’, Political Register (29 January 1831), p. 288
“If all men were upon an equality in point of means, England would become what the wilds of America are, inhabited by wild men; nobody would work except just to provide food and raiment for the day; and our country would become the most beggarly upon the earth, instead of being what it formerly was (and I hope and trust will be again) the pride of its people and the envy of the world.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1831 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘To the Labourers of England’, Political Register (2 April 1831), p. 8
“I set out as a sort of self-dependent politician. My opinions were my own. I dashed at all prejudices. I scorned to follow anybody in matter of opinion.... All were, therefore, offended at my presumption, as they deemed it.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1832 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register, LXXV, pp. 364-365 (4 February 1832)
“I...had strong feelings excited in my mind against Scotland generally (always expressly making great exceptions) by observing that the scoundrelly “feelosofers”, who preached up a doctrine, tending to cause the people of England to be treated like cattle.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1832 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (27 October 1832), p. 225
“I have a rooted hatred to this police establishment; that I hate it, because it is of foreign growth, and because it is French; that I hate it because it really tears up the government; that good-natured government, that gentle, that confiding, that neighbourly and friendly government, under which I was born, and under which my forefathers lived.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1833 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (17 August 1833), p. 386
“[I]f you maintain that the poor have no right, no legal right, to relief, you loosen all the ligaments of property; and begin that career, which must end in a contest for property between the poor and the rich: you loosen all the bonds of allegiance; you get rid of all its duties; you proclaim that might, and not right, is to prevail; and, in short, you do all in your power to break up the social compact; to produce confusion; and to leave to chance a settlement anew.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Legacy to Labourers: Or, What is the Right which the Lords, Baronets, and Squires, Have to the Lands of England? (1835), p. 124
“[T]he labourers have a right to subsistence out of the land, in all cases of inability to labour; that all those who are able to labour have a right to subsistence out of the land, in exchange for their labour; and that, if the holders of the land will not give them subsistence, in exchange for their labour, they have a right to the land itself.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Legacy to Labourers: Or, What is the Right which the Lords, Baronets, and Squires, Have to the Lands of England? (1835), p. 140
“[B]efore the passing of the Poor-Law Bill, I wished to avoid [a] convulsive termination. I now do not wish it to be avoided.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1835 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to John Oldfield (6 June 1835), quoted in Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (1992), p. 208
“Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada are the horns, the head, the neck, the shins, and the hoof of the ox, and the United States are the ribs, the sirloin, the kidneys, and the rest of the body.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects.... Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) said by 1835 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not true, that the granting of the independence of America was “an advantage to England.” It was, on the contrary, the greatest evil that ever befell her. It was the primary cause of the present war, and of all the calamities which it has brought upon England and upon Europe. If England and the American States had continued united, they would have prevented France from disturbing the peace of the world. That fatal measure, though it has not curtailed our commerce, has created a power who will be capable of assisting France in any of her future projects against us, and whose neutrality, when France recovers her marine, must be purchased by us at the expense, first of commercial concessions, and, finally, by much more important sacrifices. In short, it laid the foundation of the ruin of the British empire, which can be prevented by nothing but a wisdom, and an energy, which have never yet marked the councils of our Government, in its transactions with the American States.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1794 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: ‘A Summary View of the Politics of the United States from the close of the War to the year 1794’, Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of Amer…
“In one point, and that too of more importance than is generally attached to it, the puritans of the two epochs bear a critical resemblance, namely, their hostility to rural and athletic sports: to those sports, which string the nerves and strengthen the frame, which excite an emulation in deeds of hardihood and valour, and which imperceptibly instill honour, generosity, and a love of glory, into the mind of the clown. Men thus formed are pupils unfit for the puritanical school; therefore it is, that the sect are incessantly labouring to eradicate, fibre by fibre, the last poor remains of English manners. And, sorry I am to tell you, that they meet with but too many abettors, where they ought to meet with resolute foes. Their pretexts are plausible: gentleness and humanity are the cant of the day. Weak men are imposed on, and wise men want the courage to resist. Instead of preserving those assemblages and those sports, in which the nobleman mixed with his peasants, which made the poor man proud of his inferiority, and created in his breast a personal affection for his lord, too many of the rulers of this land are now hunting the common people from every scene of diversion, and driving them to a club or a conventicle, at the former of which they suck in the delicious rudiments of earthly equality, and, at the latter, the no less delicious doctrine, that there is no lawful king but King Jesus.”
William Cobbett (1763–1835) first seen 1802 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Political Register (27 February 1802)