William Cobbett

“You never know what you can do till you try.”

“There never yet was, and never will be, a nation permanently great, consisting, for the greater part, of wretched and miserable families.”

“It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.”

“To have a dutiful family, the father's principle of rule must be love, not fear. His sway must be gentle, or he will have only an unwilling and short-lived obedience.”

“Endless are the instances of men of bright parts and high spirit having been, by degrees, rendered powerless and despicable by their imaginary wants.”

“Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.”

“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.”

“Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write.”

“The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people.”

“The great security of all is to eat little and to drink nothing that intoxicates. He that eats till he is full is little better than a beast, and he that drinks till he is drunk is quite a beast.”

“Please your eye and plague your heart.”

“To be poor and independent is very nearly an impossibility.”

“Never - no, not for one moment - believe that any human being, with sense in his skull, will love or respect you on account of your fine or costly clothes.”

“To be without sure and safe friends in the world makes life not worth having; and whom can we be so sure of as of our children?”

“From a very early age I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave his country as good as he had found it.”

“It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced in the world.”

“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.”

“The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet.”

“Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.”

“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.”