James Fenimore Cooper

“You are young, and rich, and have friends, and at such an age I know it is hard to die!”

“I can never tire of speaking of the bridges of Paris. By day and by night have I paused on them to gaze at their views; the word not being too comprehensive for the crowds and groupings of objects that are visible from their arches.”

“Battles, unlike bargains, are rarely discussed in society.”

“The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.”

“It is not a very difficult task to make what is commonly called an amusing book of travels. Any one who will tell, with a reasonable degree of graphic effect, what he has seen, will not fail to carry the reader with him; for the interest we all feel in personal adventure is, of itself, success.”

“America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies.”

“העיתונות כמוה כלהבה: היא מהווה משרת מצוין אך אדון איום ונורא.”

“המפלגה מובילה לחקיקה מושחתת ומרושעת, במטרה לנצח את יריבתה.”

“הדמגוג הוא בדרך כלל ערמומי ומפחית בערכו של הזולת.”

“מגרעת צרת אופקים של הדמוקרטיות היא שדעת הקהל מהווה תחליף לחוקים. זו הצורה שבה ההמון מפגין את עריצותו.”

“מקורן של דעות קדומות באמריקה הוא בהשקפתם הדתית המוגזמת של אנשי הכִּתות השונות שייסדו את המושבות.”

“הדמוקרטיות נוטות לבינוניות בכל הדברים.”

“האמריקאים... כמעט אינם יודעים דבר על אודות אמנות המוזיקה.”

“עצם קיומה של ממשלה משמעו אי שוויון.”

“The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”

“Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.”

“Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.”

“Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.”

“The European who comes to America plunges into the virgin forest with wonder and delight; while the American who goes to Europe finds his greatest pleasure, at first, in hunting up the memorials of the past. Each is in quest of novelty, and is burning with the desire to gaze at objects of which he has often read.”

“The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.”