William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was 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 the Reform Bill of 1832, and to his being elected in 1832 as one of the two MPs for the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham. Although he was not a Catholic, he became a fiery advocate of Catholic Emancipation in Britain. Through the seeming contradictions in Cobbett's life, his opposition to authority stayed constant. He wrote many polemics, on subjects from political reform to religion, but is best known for his book from 1830, Rural Rides, which is still in print today.
"Sit down to write what you have thought, and not to think about what you shall write."
"Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of talent"
"You never know what you can do till you try"
"It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is caused in the world"
"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."
"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"
"The Christian religion, then, is not an affair of preaching, or prating, or ranting, but of taking care of the bodies as well as the souls of people; not an affair of belief and of faith and of professions, but an affair of doing good, and especially to those who are in want; not an affair of fire and brimstone, but an affair of bacon and read, beer and a bed."
"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."
"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"
"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."
"Never esteem men on account of their riches or their station. Respect goodness, find it where you may."
"The power which money gives is that of brute force; it is the power of the bludgeon and the bayonet."
“Draining the swamp” may be an Americanism, but it echoes William Cobbett’s denunciation of “old corruption” in our earlier parliamentary democracy, and of London as the “Great Wen”, or pustular cyst, on the face of the nation.
In many ways Unearthing reads like an extended prologue to The Great When, the first volume in a planned “LongLondonQuintet”, its title a pun on pamphleteer William Cobbett’s belief that the early ...
William Cobbett arrived in the US in 1792, “ambitious to become the citizen of a free state,” believing that this was the one place in the world where republican principles actually worked.
EverywhereI go in Britain, people are exhausted ...Labour governments do not get elected very often, and it is a feat that is chronically difficult to pull off ... Two centuries ago, it was summed up by that great English agitator William Cobbett.
In the midst of dizzying opinion polls and a seemingly unprecedented Tory collapse, it is worth remembering a basic political fact ... Two centuries ago, it was summed up by that great English agitator William Cobbett ... John Harris is a Guardian columnist.
“Cause we need a little controversy…” ... Here, social class was in flux ... the Victorian RadicalWilliam Cobbett valorised the “labouring classes “and raged against “the Thing”, an amalgam of the aristocracy, the Church and government finance ... .
Cotton’s hopes for peas by April were even less realistic than I thought ... Most popular. Lloyd Evans ... Reliably, he cited William Cobbett, the 18th-century pamphleteer, as ‘the first person to see industrialisation as the thief of our self-reliance’ ... .
Generalisations about national characteristics are open to question ...Shakespeare describes almost all the emotions except the religious ... Most popular. KatyBalls ... Inevitably, therefore, it omits Shakespeare and John Locke and Dickens and William Cobbett.
We have William Cobbett’s horrendous picture of people starving in the midst of plenty in that year ... She notes that “William Carleton was of a similar opinion that many of the letters, ...
We have William Cobbett’s horrendous picture of people starving in the midst of plenty in that year ... She notes that “William Carleton was of a similar opinion that many of the letters, ...
Danny Kruger MP was pondering when the best time to be British was. We were sitting in a living room at his home in Wilcot, Wiltshire. Around us ... Kruger suggested he might ride through on a horse, as William Cobbett did here in Rural Rides (1830).
“It’s cancelled ... old guide books, tales of smuggling and piracy and William Cobbett, the first enemy of industrialisation who fought to preserve an English rural idyll that was dying all around him at about the time Bridge Cottage was built in 1830 ... .
Former member of parliament of the United KingdomWilliam Cobbett is famously known to have stated. “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.” ... .
