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
Topics: Media
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.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Women
Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of being thought poor is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country from the fashion of the times themselves.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Poverty
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.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Taxation, Taxes
It is no small mischief to a boy, that many of the best years of his life should be devoted to the learning of what can never be of any real use to any human being. His mind is necessarily rendered frivolous and superficial by the long habit of attaching importance to words instead of things; to sound instead of sense.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Education
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.
—William Cobbett
Topics: The Poor, Poverty
I view the tea-drinking as a destroyer of health, an enfeebler of the frome, an engender of effeminacy and laziness, a debaucher of youth and maker of misery for old age
—William Cobbett
Topics: Drinking
Thousands upon thousands are yearly brought into a state of real poverty by their great anxiety not to be thought poor.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Health, Positive Attitudes, Optimism
Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Happiness
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Ambition, Patience, One Step at a Time
The tendency of taxation is to create a class of persons who do not labor, to take from those who do labor the produce of that labor, and to give it to those who do not labor
—William Cobbett
Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Perseverance
It is not the greatness of a man’s means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Independence, Desires, Desire
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 honored by the name of “speculation”; but which ought to be called Gambling.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Assumptions
Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
—William Cobbett
Topics: Books, Reading
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