William Cobbett

“With health and a good book, you are a king.”

“The object of the press is to keep the state of things as they are, to keep the rich in their possessions, and the poor in their subjection.”

“It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.”

“In short, the state of the nation is that of a house on fire: the inmates are squabbling about who is to have this room or that, while the timbers are crackling over their heads.”

“A good gulp of hot gin and water is the best of all things for a cold.”

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

“The cure for admiring the House of Commons is to go and look at it.”

“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 world to misinterpret what we say.”

“I have no desire to see the rich men's houses, and still less their tables; I have a great desire to see the poor men's cottages.”

“Let a man be of what side he may in politics, his efforts will not be wanting to pull down every one who is rising in the same line with himself.”

“Hope is a liar, yet its flatteries are so seductive that we listen to them with credulity.”

“Poverty is the cause of all the great evils in the world.”