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Richard Cobden Quotes
1804–1865 England
Richard Cobden (3 June 1804 – 2 April 1865) was a British manufacturer and Radical and Liberal statesman, associated with John Bright in the formation of the Anti-Corn Law League.
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17 quotes
If the United States go wrong what hope have we of the civilized world in our turn?
You have no security for a man who has no religious principle.
I say that if England takes due advantage of her insular position, and confines herself to her own affairs, and does not run into needless and rash disputes with other countries, there never was a time when she stood so free from danger of war as at the present moment.
I know that there are many heads which cannot comprehend and master a proposition in political economy. I believe that study is the highest exercise of the human mind.
Our only chance as a nation is in knowing in time what is sure to come from the United States.
I believe it has been said that one copy of the Times contains more useful information than the whole of the historical works of Thucydides.
It has been one of my difficulties, in arguing this question out of doors with friends or strangers, that I rarely find any intelligible agreement as to the object of the war.
'Tis a great sin for man or woman
I believe that if you abolish the Corn-law honestly, and adopt Free Trade in its simplicity, there will not be a tariff in Europe that will not be changed in less than five years to follow your example.
[T]he principles of political economy have elevated the working class above the place they ever filled before.
Depend upon it, nothing can be got by fraternizing with trades unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trades Committee.
Our history must be rewritten for the last two centuries before the people will be able to deal out justice to the two aristocratic parties who have done their best to ruin a country so favoured by nature as almost to defy the effort to destroy its prosperity.
I believe that the harm which Mill has done to the world by the passage in his book on Political Economy in which he favours the principle of Protection in young communities, has outweighed all the good which may have been caused by his other writings.
The people of the two nations [French and English] must be brought into mutual dependence by the supply of each other's wants. There is no other way of counteracting the antagonism of language and race. It is God's own method of producing an entente cordiale, and no other plan is worth a farthing.
What, then, is the good of this "protection"? Why, the country have come to regard it, as they regard witchcraft, as a mere sound and a delusion. They no more regard your precautions against free trade, than they regard the horse-shoes that are nailed over the stables to keep the witches away from the horses.
I have told you before that Gladstone has shown much heart in this business. He has a strong aversion to the waste of money on our armaments. He has much more of our sympathies. He has more in common with you and me than any other man of his power in Britain.
Letter to John Bright (1860)
I think we have been the most Conservative. I think that myself, and my friend Mr. Bright, and many I see about me, who have voted for twenty years for what have been considered revolutionary measures, have been the great Conservatives of our own age.
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