William Cobbett Quotes
From a very early age, I had imbibed the opinion that it was every man's duty to do all that lay in his power to leave the country as good as he had found it.
William Cobbett, 1763-1835, British Journalist & Editor, Member of Parliament, Political Register, December 22, 1832
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
See John F. Kennedy {589867} for a later expression of this concept. Also Khalil Gibran {601423} and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707}
This may be Kennedy’s most famous line. However he was not the first orator to express this idea however. See Khalil Gibran {601423}, Warren G. Harding {622594} and {629021}, St. John Broderick {595734}, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. {603707} for earlier expressions of similar sentiments. Holmes seems to be the first to express the idea while the earliest seems similar phraseology seems to be the British Politician St. John Broderick in 1893 {595734}. Although, these earlier expressions existed, Theodore C. Sorensen, who assisted Kennedy with this speech and wrote the draft, had distilled it from earlier expressions and views of JFK and said that these were Kennedy’s words. At the time, he stated that was unaware of the Gibran, Harding, Broderick and Holmes sentiments. Gibran had not yet even been translated into English. However it is not clear whether Kennedy himself had inadvertently recollected the phrase from any of the other quotations. (The question was never put to him.) The St. John Broderick quotation is a possible source. Kennedy was quite familiar with British political history, and his father and been U. S. Ambassador to Great Britain. Regardless, the quotation was as great for the place and timing—his inaugural—as it was for the phraseology which might have originated elsewhere.
Explaining his reasons for raising and donating millions of dollars for both major political parties:
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, journalist, Member of Parliament and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey, one of a popular agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain wanton foreign activity and increase wages, to promote domestic peace and ease poverty among farm labourers and smallholders. He backed lower taxes, saving, reversing enclosures of commons and resisting the gold standard of 1821. He sought an end to borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" (overpaid and corrupt bureaucrats, public servants and stockbrokers), and dismissed British Jews in a typecast by the same token. Early in life he was a soldier and devotee of king and country, but later pushed for a radicalism that helped to produce the Reform Act 1832 and gain him one of two seats in Parliament for the newly enfranchised borough of Oldham. He urged Catholic emancipation. He saw British agriculture and other economic output geographically. His polemics cover subjects from political reform to religion. His best known book is Rural Rides (1830, still in print). He argued against Malthusianism that economic betterment could support global population growth.
