William Cobbett citations (58 citations, Page 2)

William Cobbett: 58 citations0 J'aime

William Cobbett: Citations en anglais

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

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).

“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.”

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William Cobbett

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

“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?"”

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William Cobbett

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

“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.”

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William Cobbett

Letter 1, p. 36.
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.”

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William Cobbett

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

“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.”

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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!”

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William Cobbett

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

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

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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.””

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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.”

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William Cobbett

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

“[B]efore the passing of the Poor-Law Bill, I wished to avoid [a] convulsive termination. I now do not wish it to be avoided.”

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William Cobbett

Letter to John Oldfield (6 June 1835), quoted in Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (1992), p. 208
1830s

“I...had strong feelings excited in my mind against Scotland generally (always expressly making great exceptions) by observing that the scoundrelly “feelosofers”, who preached up a doctrine, tending to cause the people of England to be treated like cattle.”

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William Cobbett

Political Register (27 October 1832), p. 225
1830s

“The profession of arms is always the most honourable.”

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William Cobbett

‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 199
1800s

“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.”

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William Cobbett

‘Observations on Priestley's Emigration’ (August 1794), Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of America, Volume I (1801), p. 169
1790s

“I have a rooted hatred to this police establishment; that I hate it, because it is of foreign growth, and because it is French; that I hate it because it really tears up the government; that good-natured government, that gentle, that confiding, that neighbourly and friendly government, under which I was born, and under which my forefathers lived.”

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William Cobbett

Political Register (17 August 1833), p. 386
1830s

“If all men were upon an equality in point of means, England would become what the wilds of America are, inhabited by wild men; nobody would work except just to provide food and raiment for the day; and our country would become the most beggarly upon the earth, instead of being what it formerly was (and I hope and trust will be again) the pride of its people and the envy of the world.”

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William Cobbett

‘To the Labourers of England’, Political Register (2 April 1831), p. 8
1830s

“Born amongst husbandmen, bred to husbandry, delighting in its pursuits even to the minutest details, never having, in all my range through life, lost sight of the English farm-house and of those scenes in which my mind took its first spring, it is natural that I should have a strong partiality for a country life, and that I should enter more in detail into the feelings of labourers in husbandry than into those of other labourers.”

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William Cobbett

‘To Mr. Attwood’, Political Register (5 May 1821), p. 343
1820s

“After this, who will say that an Englishman ought not to despise “all the nations of Europe?””

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William Cobbett

For my part I do, and that most “heartily.”

Porcupine's Gazette (December 1797), Porcupine's Works; containing various writings and selections, exhibiting a faithful picture of the United States of America, Volume VII (1801), p. 428
1790s

“[W]hen our country shall have got a good and cheap government, we can, with clear consciences, recommend the paring of their nails, and the making of them bow to that power which, freed from infernal boroughmongering, will again claim and enforce her dominion of the seas. No American that ever conversed with me upon this subject will deny, that I always said, that I should never die in peace without making them again bow to England; and that bow to her again they should, whenever we shook off the power of the hellish boroughmongers. ... ENGLAND is my country: I must share in all her glory and in all her disgrace; and when it is a question of her honour and well-being, I must cast aside all private recollections and feelings. ... I always said...I never would rest until I saw the Americans acknowledge, explicitly our right to dominion on the seas. I wish them all the happiness that men can enjoy in this world; but a nation may be very happy without being permitted to swagger about and be saucy to England.”

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William Cobbett

Political Register (2 June 1832), p. 545
1830s

“I am no citizen of the world. It is quite enough for me to think about what is best for England, Ireland and Scotland. I do not like those whose philanthropy is so enlarged as to look, as Rousseau said, to Tartary for objects of affection and commiseration, while their own countrymen are starving, or existing on sea-weed and nettles. I do not approve of any efforts to urge our Government to interfere at all in the affairs even of Poland: it is too distant, too out of the way of our affairs, that we should take one single meal from a weaver or a ploughman for the sake of doing good to the Poles.”

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William Cobbett

‘Belgium and Poland’, Political Register (20 August 1831), p. 496
1830s

“My dislike of the Jews is that which our forefathers had of them: I dislike them as insolent ruffians, who mock the religion and morality of Christians; I dislike them as people that never work, and form a body of wretches who live by trick; I dislike them as usurers, and the great agents of those systems of usury by which so many nations have so severely suffered; and this nation, above all others; in France they were the rapacious farmers of the taxes; in Poland, in Germany, in Hungary; every where, where they have been allowed to practise their arts of plunder, they have produced ruin to the people, and very frequently to the state.”

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William Cobbett

Political Register (5 June 1830), p. 730
1830s

“They were more than a thousand in number, including the mere partizans of my enemies. Several attempts were made to press me down. I got many blows in the sides; and if I had been either a short or a weak man, I must have been pressed under foot, and inevitably killed. ... I had, when I left the Booth, my snuff-box in my right hand. It is oblong square, and has very sharp corners. The Savages pressed me side-ways towards my left; and I had to fight with my right hand, in order to prevent them from getting me down. I had to strike back-handed. One of the sharp corners of the snuff-box, which stuck out beyond the bottom of my little finger, did good service. It cut the noses and eyes of the Savages at a famous rate, and assisted mainly in securing my safe arrival, on the raised pavement, on which I got just opposite to the door of a shop. Just at this time, one of the Savages, foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, exclaimed: “damn him, I'll rip him up.””

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William Cobbett

He was running his hand into his breeches pocket, apparently to take out his knife, but I...drew up my right leg, armed with a new and sharp-edged gallashe over my boot, dealt Mr. Ellice's ripping Savage so delightful a blow, just between his two eyes, that he fell back upon his followers.

‘History of the Coventry Election’, Political Register (25 March 1820), pp. 102–3
1820s

“It has long been a fashion amongst you, which you have had the complaisance to adopt at the instigation of a corrupt press, to call every friend of reform, every friend of freedom, a Jacobin, and to accuse him of French principles. ... What are these principles?—That governments were made for the people, and not the people for governments.—That sovereigns reign legally only by virtue of the people's choice.—That birth without merit ought not to command merit without birth.--That all men ought to be equal in the eye of the law.—That no man ought to be taxed or punished by any law to which he has not given his assent by himself or by his representative.—That taxation and representation ought to go hand in hand.—That every man ought to be judged by his peers, or equals.—That the press ought to be free. ... Ten thousand times as much has been written on the subject in England as in all the rest of the world put together. Our books are full of these principles. ... There is not a single political principle which you denominate French, which has not been sanctioned by the struggles of ten generations of Englishmen, the names of many of whom you repeat with veneration, because, apparently, you forget the grounds of their fame. To Tooke, Burdett, Cartwright, and a whole host of patriots of England, Scotland and Ireland, imprisoned or banished, during the administration of Pitt, you can give the name of Jacobins, and accuse them of French principles. Yet, not one principle have they ever attempted to maintain that Hampden and Sydney did not seal with their blood.”

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William Cobbett

‘To the Merchants of England’, Political Register (29 April 1815), pp. 518–19
1810s

“Not only boxing, but wrestling, quarter-staff, single-stick, bull-baiting, every exercise of the common people, that supposes the possible risk of life or limb, and, of course, that tends to prepare them for deeds of bravery of a higher order, and, by the means of those deeds and of the character and consequence naturally growing out of them, to preserve the independence and the liberties of their country; every such exercise seems to be doomed to extirpation. ... Every thing calculated to keep alive the admiration, and even the idea, of hardihood, seems to have become offensive and odious in the sight of but too many of those, whose duty it is to endeavour to arrest, and not to accelerate, the fatal progress of effeminacy. ... That cuttings and stabbings are more fatal than boxing, to say nothing of the disgrace, every one must agree; and, it cannot be denied, that the former have increased in proportion as the latter has been driven from amongst the people.”

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William Cobbett

‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 200
1800s

“Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery: these are the stages of national degradation. We are in the fourth; and, I beg the reader to consider, to look into history, to trace states in their fall, and then say how rapid is the latter part of the progress! Of the symptoms of effeminacy none is so certain as a change from athletic and hardy sports, or exercises, to those requiring less bodily strength, and exposing the persons engaged in them to less bodily suffering; and when this change takes place, be assured that national cowardice is at no great distance, the general admiration of deeds of hardihood having already been considerably lessened.”

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William Cobbett

‘Boxing’, Political Register (10 August 1805), p. 197
1800s