James F. Cooper Quotes

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

— James F. Cooper

“All that a good government aims at ... is to add no unnecessary and artificial aid to the force of its own unavoidable consequences, and to abstain from fortifying and accumulating social inequality as a means of increasing political inequalities.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving 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.

— James F. Cooper

A monarchy is the most expensive of all forms of government, the regal state requiring a costly parade, and he who depends on his own power to rule, must strengthen that power by bribing the active and enterprising whom he cannot intimidate.

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“It is a misfortune that necessity has induced men to accord greater license to this formidable engine, in order to obtain liberty, than can be borne with less important objects in view; for the press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.”

— James F. Cooper

“The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”

— James F. Cooper

“Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“No star seemed less than what science has taught us that it is.”

— James F. Cooper

“I do not pretend that all that white men do is properly Christianized ...”

— James F. Cooper

“How easy it is for generous sentiments, high courtesy, and chivalrous courage to lose their influence beneath the chilling blight of selfishness, and to exhibit to the world a man who was great in all the minor attributes of character, but who was found wanting when it became necessary to prove how much principle is superior to policy.”

— James F. Cooper

The vulgar charge that the tendency of democracies is to leveling, meaning to drag all down to the level of the lowest, is singularly untrue; its real tendency being to elevate the depressed to a condition not unworthy of their manhood.

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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.

— James F. Cooper

Liberty is not a matter of words, but a positive and important condition of society. Its greatest safeguard after placing its foundations in a popular base, is in the checks and balances imposed on the public servants.

— James F. Cooper

“Some changes of language are to be regretted, as they lead to false inferences, and society is always a loser by mistaking names for things.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

As reason and revelation both tell us that this state of being is but a preparation for another of a still higher and more spiritual order, all the interests of life are of comparatively little importance, when put in the balance against the future.

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“We can all perceive the difference between ourselves and our inferiors, but when it comes to a question of the difference between us and our superiors we fail to appreciate merits of which we have no proper conceptions.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“I can't see no great difference atween givin' up territory afore a war, out of a dread of war, and givin' it up after a war, because we can't help it-unless it be that the last is the most manful and honourable.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“In America, it is indispensable that every well wisher of true liberty should understand that acts of tyranny can only proceed from the publick. The publick, then, is to be watched, in this country, as, in other countries kings and aristocrats are to be watched.”

— James F. Cooper

“It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict.”

— James F. Cooper

“The sun had not risen, but the vault of heaven was rich with the winning, softness that "brings and shuts the day," while the whole air was filled with the carols of birds, the hymns of the feathered tribe.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

“The flesh is sweeter, where the creature has some chance for its life; for that reason, I always use a single ball, even if it be at a bird or a squirrel; besides, it saves lead, for, when a body knows how to shoot, one piece of lead is enough for all, except hard-lived animals.”

— James F. Cooper

“The demagogue is usually sly, a detractor of others, a professor of humility and disinterestedness, a great stickler for equality as respects all above him, a man who acts in corners, and avoids open and manly expositions of his course, calls blackguards gentlemen, and gentlemen folks, appeals to passions and prejudices rather than to reason, and is in all respects, a man of intrigue and deception, of sly cunning and management.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“There are evils worse than death,”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

“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.”

— James F. Cooper

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

— James F. Cooper