James F. Cooper Quotes

Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.

It is better for a man to die at peace with himself than to live haunted by an evil conscience!

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.

Hope is the most treacherous of all human fancies.

Individuality is the aim of political liberty.

Death is appalling to those of the most iron nerves, when it comes quietly and in the stillness and solitude of night.

The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.

Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.

Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannogt congeal in winter.

A soul,--a spark of the never-dying flame that separates man from all the other beings of earth.

Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.

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.

It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny.

The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference.

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.

There are evils worse than death.

Candor is a proof of both a just frame of mind, and of a good tone of breeding. It is a quality that belongs equally to the honest man and to the gentleman.

No civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.

The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality.

The minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.

What will the axemen do, when they have cut their way from sea to sea?

The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.

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.

The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.

Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion.

America owes most of its social prejudices to the exaggerated religious opinions of the different sects which were so instrumental in establishing the colonies.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time.

Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true.

These families, you know, are our upper crust, not upper ten thousand.

Christ, in the parable of the vine dressers, has taught us a sublime lesson of justice, by showing that to the things which are not our own, we can have no just claim.

Superstition is a quality that seems indigenous to the ocean.

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.

The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior of those who are not, so long he is the repository of power.

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.

If the newspapers are useful in overthrowing tyrants, it is only to establish a tyranny of their own.

It is the fate of all things to ripen, and then to decay.

The ability to discriminate between that which is true and that which is false is one of the last attainments of the human mind.

Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?

The sight of a coward's blood can never make a warrior tremble.

Apathy is the great requisite for the station; for woe betide the wretch who fancies any modicum of zeal.

The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.

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.

Whatever may be the changes produced by man, the eternal round of the seasons is unbroken.

It is seldom men think of death in the pride of their health and strength.

There is a destiny in war, to which a brave man knows how to submit with the same courage that he faces his foes.

The sublimity connected with vastness, is familiar to every eye.

When men struggle for the single life God has given them ... even their own kind seem no more than the beasts of the wood.

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.