William Cobbett Quotes
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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.
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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.
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WESTBURY, a nasty odious rotten-borough, a really rotten place.
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The smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth.
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Norwich is a very fine city, and the castle, which stands in the middle of it, on a hill, is truly majestic.
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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.
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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"?
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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.
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All Middlesex is ugly, notwithstanding the millions upon millionswhichit iscontinuallysucking up fromtherestof the kingdom.
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Please your eye and plague your heart.
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Freedom is not an empty sound; it is not an abstract idea; it is not a thing that nobody can feel. It means, - and it means nothing else, - the full and quiet enjoyment of your own property. If you have not this, if this be not well secured to you, you may call yourself what you will, but you are a slave.
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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.
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Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
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Before I dismiss this affair of eating and drinking, let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle, if, unhappily, you have been bred up in such slavery.
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From a very early age I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.
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It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.
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The town of GUILDFORD, which (taken with its environs) I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking, that I ever saw in my life.
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It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
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Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.
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I view tea drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frame, an en-genderer of effeminancy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age. Thus he makes that miserable progress towards that death which he finds ten or fifteen years sooner than he would have found it if he had made his wife brew beer instead of making tea.
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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.
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If the people of Sheffield could only receive a tenth part of what their knives sell for by retail in America, Sheffield might pave its streets with silver.
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Protestations of impartiality I shall make none. Theyare always useless and are besides perfect nonsense, when used bya news-monger.
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Praise the child, and you make love to the mother.