Quote#Nature
Our history must be rewritten for the last two centuries before the…
Quote byRichard Cobden · 1804–1865
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: Letter to J. B. Smith (27 October 1852), quoted in John Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–1868 [1966] (1972), p. 70.
English (original)
Our history must be rewritten for the last two centuries before the people will be able to deal out justice to the two aristocratic parties who have done their best to ruin a country so favoured by nature as almost to defy the effort to destroy its prosperity.
— Richard Cobden
More from Richard Cobden
I know that there are many heads which cannot comprehend and master a proposition in political economy. I believe that study is the highest exercise of the human mind.
What, then, is the good of this "protection"? Why, the country have come to regard it, as they regard witchcraft, as a mere sound and a delusion. They no more regard your precautions against free trade, than they regard the horse-shoes …
I believe that if you abolish the Corn-law honestly, and adopt Free Trade in its simplicity, there will not be a tariff in Europe that will not be changed in less than five years to follow your example.
Depend upon it, nothing can be got by fraternizing with trades unions. They are founded upon principles of brutal tyranny and monopoly. I would rather live under a Dey of Algiers than a Trades Committee.
...the twelve or fifteen millions in the British Empire, who, while they possess no electoral rights, are yet persuaded they are freemen, and who are mystified into the notion that they are not political bondmen, by that great juggle of …
What we want before all things is a bold retrenchment of expenditure. I may take a too one-sided view of the matter, but I consider nine-tenths of all our future dangers to be financial, and when I came home from the continent, it was with …