William Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbettwas an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly. He was also against the Corn Laws, a tax on imported grain. Early in his career, he was a loyalist supporter of King and Country: but later he joined and successfully publicised the radical movement, which led to...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth9 March 1763
It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world
It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent so much as the smallness of his wants
. . . for, however roguish a man may be, he always loves to deal with an honest man.
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
It is by attempting to reach the top at a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world.
Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think what you shall write.
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.
Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent.
I defy you to agitate any fellow with a full stomach.
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 smallness of our desires may contribute reasonably to our wealth.
Poverty is, except where there is an actual want of food and raiment, a thing much more imaginary than real. The shame of poverty--the shame of being thought poor--it is a great and fatal weakness, though arising in this country, from the fashion of the times themselves.
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.
You never know what you can do till you try.