Quotes from James F. Cooper

All that a good government aims at... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.

Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.

God has given the salt lick to the deer; and He has given to man, red-skin and white, the delicious spring at which to slake his thirst.

Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?

Contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed.

I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized.

When men struggle for the single life God has given them ... even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.

There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.

It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken.

Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannogt congeal in winter.

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.

It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil.

Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies.

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

No star seemed less than what science has taught us that it is.

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

No civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.

The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.

Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of adding the vast regions of Louisiana, to the already immense, and but half-tenanted territories of the United-States.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.