William Cobbett

Author

1763 – 1835

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Who was William Cobbett?

William Cobbett 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 winning the parliamentary seat 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.

Famous Quotes:

  • 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.
  • It is not the greatness of a man's means that makes him independent, so much as the smallness of his wants.
  • 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.
  • Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers.
  • Happiness, or misery, is in the mind. It is the mind that lives.
  • 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 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.
  • It is by attempting to reach the top in a single leap that so much misery is produced 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.
  • 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.

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Born
Mar 9, 1763
Farnham
Nationality
  • England
Profession
Died
Jun 18, 1835
Normandy

Submitted
on July 23, 2013

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