James F. Cooper
It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.Collection: Fate
Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to publick opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem the true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, and the wrong the right.Collection: Government
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.Collection: Lonely
Advice is not a gift, but a debt that the old owe to the young.Collection: Advice
If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.Collection: Tyrants
Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies.Collection: Hope
The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.Collection: Mind
It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!Collection: Men
Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannogt congeal in winter.Collection: Motivational
Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner.Collection: Mean
The sight of a coward's blood can never make a warrior tremble.Collection: Warrior
Principles . . . become modified in practice, by facts.Collection: Reality
A soul,--a spark of the never-dying flame that separates man from all the other beings of earth.Collection: Men
The air, the water and the ground are free gifts to man and no one has the power to portion them out in parcels. Man must drink and breathe and walk and therefore each man has a right to his share of each.Collection: Men
The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.Collection: Fire
Contact with the affairs of state is one of the most corrupting of the influences to which men are exposed.Collection: Men
Commerce is entitled to a complete and efficient protection in all its legal rights, but the moment it presumes to control a country, or to substitute its fluctuating expedients for the high principles of natural justice that ought to lie at the root of every political system, it should be frowned on, and rebuked.Collection: Country
The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.Collection: Country
The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference.Collection: Ocean
The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye.Collection: Book
The listeners got some such insights into their past lives, as one gets into the darker parts of the woods, when a stray gleam of sunshine finds its way down to the roots of the trees.Collection: Sunshine
The Americans... are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency.Collection: Art
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.Collection: Freedom
Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.Collection: Variables
Perfection is always found in maturity, whether it be in the animal or in the intellectual world. Reflection is the mother of wisdom, and wisdom the parent of success.Collection: Mother
It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.Collection: Pride
Aristocracy: A combination of many powerful men, for the purpose of maintaining their own particular interests. It is consequently a concentration of all the most effective parts of a community for a given end, hence its energy, efficiency and success.Collection: Powerful
If we would have civilization and the exertion indispensable to its success, we must have property; if we have property, we must have its rights; if we have the rights of property, we must take those consequences of the rights of property which are inseparable from the rights themselves.Collection: Rights
No one, who is familiar with the bustle and activity of an American commercial town, would recognise, in the repose which now reigns in the ancient mart of Rhode Island, a place that, in its day, has been ranked amongst the most important ports along the whole line of our extended coast.Collection: Book
I've heard it said that there are men who read in books to convince themselves there is a God. I know not but man may so deform his works in the settlements, as to leave that which is so clear in the wilderness a matter of doubt among traders and priests.Collection: Book
It is a governing principle of nature, that the agency which can produce most good, when perverted from its proper aim, is most productive of evil. It behooves the well-intentioned, therefore, vigorously to watch the tendency of even their most highly prized institutions, since that which was established in the interests of the right, may so easily become the agent of the wrong.Collection: Integrity
Where are your combing seas, your blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?Collection: Children
Property is desirable as the ground work of moral independence, as a means of improving the faculties, and of doing good to others, and as the agent in all that distinguishes the civilized man from the savage.Collection: Mean
God has given the salt lick to the deer; and He has given to man, red-skin and white, the delicious spring at which to slake his thirst.Collection: Spring
The American doctrinaire is the converse of the American demagogue, and, in this way, is scarcely less injurious to the public. The first deals in poetry, the last in cant. He is as much a visionary on one side, as the extreme theoretical democrat is a visionary on the other.Collection: Principles
Much was said and written, at the time, concerning the policy of adding the vast regions of Louisiana, to the already immense, and but half-tenanted territories of the United-States.Collection: Book
Hebrews . This book is much superior to most of the writings attributed to St. Paul, though passages in the other books are very admirable.Collection: Book
A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent.Collection: Book
These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.Collection: Society
At no period of the naval history of the world, is it probable that Marines were more important than during the War of the Revolution.Collection: War
There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.Collection: War
The novice in the military art flew from point to point, retarding his own preparations by the excess of his violent and somewhat distempered zeal; while the more practiced veteran made his arrangements with a deliberation that scorned every appearance of hasteCollection: Art
Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken.Collection: Men
It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names.Collection: Names
When men struggle for the single life God has given them ... even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.Collection: Struggle
A refined simplicity is the characteristic of all high bred deportment, in every country, and a considerate humanity should be the aim of all beneath it.Collection: Country
Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true.Collection: Truth
New York is essentially national in interest, position, pursuits. No one thinks of the place as belonging to a particular state, but to the United States.Collection: New York
Apathy is the great requisite for the station; for woe betide the wretch who fancies any modicum of zeal.Collection: Apathy
One of the most melancholy consequences of this habit of deferring to other nations, and to other systems, is the fact that it causes us to undervalue the high blessings we so peculiarly enjoy; to render us ungrateful towards God, and to make us unjust to our fellow men, by throwing obstacles in their progress towards liberty.Collection: Men