Quotes from William Cobbett

You can tell a lot about a country which refers to the Royal Mint and the National Debt.

Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.

He who can deliberately inflict torture upon an animal, in order to heighten the pleasure his palate is to receive in eating it, is an abuser of the authority which God has given him, and is, indeed, a tyrant in his heart.

if she be ignorant of the nature of flour, yeast, malt, and hops, what is she good for?

You never know what you can do till you try.

The law of nature bids a man not starve in the midst of plenty, and forbids his being punished for taking food wherever he can find it. Your law of nature is sitting at Westminster.

Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.

let me beseech you to resolve to free yourselves from the slavery of the tea and coffee and other slop-kettle,

especially if, as the Scotch would have us believe, there were but a mere handful of people in England until of late years.

To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.

Please your eye and plague your heart.

Learning consists of ideas, and not of the noise that is made by the mouth.

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.

The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor.

It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.

It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.

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.

The great security of all is to eat little and to drink nothing that intoxicates. He that eats till he is full is little better than a beast, and he that drinks till he is drunk is quite a beast.

Endless are the instances of men of bright parts and high spirit having been, by degrees, rendered powerless and despicable by their imaginary wants.

It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.

There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.

Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.

Never - no, not for one moment - believe that any human being, with sense in his skull, will love or respect you on account of your fine or costly clothes.

The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people.