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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

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James F. Cooper
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More quotes by James F. Cooper

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Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving to 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
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There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
James F. Cooper
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Where are your combing seas, your blue water, your rollers, your breakers, your whales, or your waterspouts, and your endless motion, in this bit of a forest, child?
James F. Cooper
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A single glance at the map will make the reader acquainted with the position of the eastern coast of the island of Great Britain, as connected with the shores of the opposite continent.
James F. Cooper
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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.
James F. Cooper
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We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.
James F. Cooper
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The disposition of all power is to abuses, nor does it at all mend the matter that its possessors are a majority. Unrestrained political authority, though it be confided to masses, cannot be trusted without positive limitations, men in bodies being but an aggregation of the passions, weaknesses and interests of men as individuals.
James F. Cooper
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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
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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
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tis hard to live in a world where all look upon you as below them.
James F. Cooper
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Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.
James F. Cooper
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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
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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.
James F. Cooper
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A soul,--a spark of the never-dying flame that separates man from all the other beings of earth.
James F. Cooper
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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
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It's wisest always to be so clad that our friends need not ask us for our names.
James F. Cooper
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The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity, since the tastes, knowledge, and principles of the majority form the tribunal of appeal.
James F. Cooper
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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.
James F. Cooper
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Should we distrust the man because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark?
James F. Cooper
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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