Skip to content

But why should the Americans write books, when a six weeks passage brings them, in their own tongue, our sense, science, and genius, in bales and hogsheads? Prairies, steam-boats, grist-mills, are their natural objects for centuries to come.

— Sydney Smith

Another quote →

Source and credibility

Wikiquote does not flag this quote as disputed or misattributed.

Source: in The Edinburgh Review (December 1818); reprinted in Robert Walsh, Jr., An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain respecting the United States of America (Philadelphia, 1819), p. 229
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Sydney Smith

Economy, in the estimation of common minds, often means the absence of all taste and comfort.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Life is to be fortified by many friendships. To love, and to be loved, is the greatest happiness of existence.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

The Smiths never had any arms, and have invariably sealed their letters with their thumbs.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

It requires a surgical operation to get a joke well into a Scotch understanding.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Never give way to melancholy; resist it steadily, for the habit will encroach.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

As the French say, there are three sexes — men, women, and clergymen.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Avoid shame, but do not seek glory: nothing so expensive as glory.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

All Sydney Smith quotes →

More quotes by Sydney Smith

It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.

Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy (1849)

Let onion atoms lurk within the bowl
And, scarce suspected, animate the whole.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

Great men hallow a whole people and lift up all who live in their time.

The object of preaching is, constantly to remind mankind of what mankind are constantly forgetting; not to supply the defects of human intelligence, but to fortify the feebleness of human resolutions.

It is always right that a man should be able to render a reason for the faith that is within him.

Lady Holland's Memoir (1855)

All Sydney Smith quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Sydney Smith (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.