William Cobbett: Trending quotes (page 2)

“I was a countryman and a father before I was a writer on political subjects…. Born and bred up in the sweet air myself, I was resolved that [my children] should be bred up in it too.”

William Cobbett

Source: The Autobiography of William Cobbett (1933), Ch. 8, p. 99.

Children

“Amongst the great and numerous dangers to which this country, and particularly the monarchy, is exposed in consequence of the enormous public debt, the influence, the powerful and widely-extended influence, of the monied interest is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it necessarily aims at measures which directly tend to the subversion of the present order of things…I mean an interest hostile alike to the land-holder and to the stockholder, to the colonies, to the real merchant, and to the manufacturer, to the clergy, to the nobility and to the throne; I mean the numerous and powerful body of loan-jobbers, directors, brokers, contractors and farmers-general, which has been engendered by the excessive amount of the public debt, and the almost boundless extension of the issues of paper-money.”

William Cobbett

Political Register (8 September 1804), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 29.

Money , Hostility , Country

“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.”

William Cobbett

“The Last Ten Years,” Political Register (4 January 1812).

People

“Having still in my recollection so many excellent men, to whose grandfathers, upon the same spots, my grandfather had yielded cheerful obedience and reverence, it is not without sincere sorrow that I have beheld many of the sons of these men driven from their fathers' mansions, or holding them as little better than tenants or stewards, while the swarms of Placemen, Pensioners, Contractors, and Nabobs…have usurped a large part of the soil.”

William Cobbett

Political Register (21 December 1816), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 31.

Men , Parting , Sincerity

“I would have these good people to recollect, that the laws of this country hold out to foreigners an offer of all that liberty of the press which Americans enjoy, and that, if this liberty be abridged, by whatever means it may be done, the laws and the constitution, and all together, is a mere cheat; a snare to catch the credulous and enthusiastic of every other nation; a downright imposition on the world.”

William Cobbett

Source: Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 59.

People , World , Law , Cheating

“I began my editorial career with the presidency of Mr. Adams, and my principal object was to render his administration all the assistance in my power. I flattered myself with the hope of accompanying him through [his] voyage, and of partaking in a trifling degree, of the glory of the enterprise; but he suddenly tacked about, and I could follow him no longer. I therefore waited for the first opportunity to haul down my sails.”

William Cobbett

Porcupine’s Gazette, No. 799 (13 January 1800).

Hope , Waiting

“The ancient nobility and gentry of the kingdom…have been thrust out of all public employment…a race of merchants, and manufacturers and bankers and loan-jobbers and contractors have usurped their place.”

William Cobbett

Political Register (10-17 July 1802), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 8.

“Another great evil arising from this desire to be thought rich; or rather, from the desire not to be thought poor, is the destructive thing which has been honoured by the name of “speculation”; but which ought to be called Gambling.”

William Cobbett

Letter 2.
Advice to Young Men (1829)

Evil

“…the existence of a 'system' that was ruining the country. The system of upstarts; of low-bred, low-minded sycophants usurping the stations designed by nature, by reason, by the Constitution, and by the interests of the people, to men of high birth, eminent talents, or great national services; the system by which the ancient Aristocracy and the Church have been undermined; by which the ancient gentry of the kingdom have been almost extinguished, their means of support having been transferred, by the hand of the tax gatherer, to contractors, jobbers and Jews; the system by which but too many of the higher orders have been rendered the servile dependents of the minister of the day, and by which the lower, their generous spirit first broken down, have been moulded into a mass of parish fed paupers. Unless it be the intention, the solemn resolution, to change this system, let no one talk to me of a change of ministry; for, until this system be destroyed…until the filthy tribe of jobbers, brokers and peculators shall be swept from the councils of the nation and the society of her statesmen…there is no change of men, that can, for a single hour, retard the mighty mischief that we dread.”

William Cobbett

Political Register (20 April 1805), quoted in Karl W. Schweizer and John W. Osborne, Cobbett and His Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), pp. 27-28, 71-72.

Men , People , Birth , Support

“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.”

William Cobbett

Source: Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 22.

Housing , Happiness

“However roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.”

William Cobbett

Letter, Philadelphia, to Rachel Smithers (6 July 1794), published in The Autobiography of William Cobbett: The Progress of a Plough-boy to a Seat in Parliament, ch. 5, p. 57 (1933).

Love

“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.”

William Cobbett

Political Register, XLVI, pp. 513-514 (31 May 1823).

People , Clothes

“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?"”

William Cobbett

Cobbett's Weekly Political Register (5 January 1822).

Fate

“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.”

William Cobbett

Letter 1, p. 36.
Advice to Young Men (1829)

Money

“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.”

William Cobbett

Source: Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 21.

People , Country

“Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express.”

William Cobbett

Page 14.
A Grammar of the English Language (1818)

“[T]he very best and most virtuous of all mankind, the agricultural labourers of this land, so favoured by God Almighty, and for so many ages the freest and happiest country in the world!”

William Cobbett

‘To the Labourers of England, on their duties and their rights’, Political Register (29 January 1831), p. 288
1830s

World , God , Age , Country

“We want great alteration, but we want nothing new.”

William Cobbett

Political Register (2 November 1816), pp. 454–55
1810s

“It is not true, that the granting of the independence of America was “an advantage to England.””

William Cobbett

It was, on the contrary, the greatest evil that and ever befell her. It was the primary cause of the present war, and of all the calamities which it has brought upon England and upon Europe. If England and the American States had continued united, they would have prevented France from disturbing the peace of the world. That fatal measure, though it has not curtailed our commerce, has created a power who will be capable of assisting France in any of her future projects against us, and whose neutrality, when France recovers her marine, must be purchased by us at the expense, first of commercial concessions, and, finally, by much more important sacrifices. In short, it laid the foundation of the ruin of the British empire, which can be prevented by nothing but a wisdom, and an energy, which have never yet marked the councils of our Government, in its transactions with the American States.

‘A Summary View of the Politics of the United States from the close of the War to the year 1794’, Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of America, Volume I (1801), pp. 47–8
1790s

“All that I can boast of in my birth, is, that I was born in Old England.”

William Cobbett

Source: 1790s, Life and Adventures of Peter Porcupine (1796), P. 1

Birth