34 quotes
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.
The profession of arms is always the most honourable.
Men of integrity are generally pretty obstinate in adhering to an opinion once adopted.
Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796)
However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.
All that I can boast of in my birth, is, that I was born in Old England.
Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796)
Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
Advice to Young Men (1829)
We want great alteration, but we want nothing new.
A full belly to the labourer was, in my opinion, the foundation of public morals and the only source of real public peace.
The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1833)
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.
Advice to Young Men (1829)
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"?
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.
Advice to Young Men (1829)
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.
Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796)
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
A Grammar of the English Language (1818)
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.
Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796)
What did Brandreth do more than was done by the Whigs at the Revolution?
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.”
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.
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.
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.
The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1833)
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.