James Fenimore Cooper
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.
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
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.
Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter.
The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
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 minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.
...no civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.
Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true.
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
- All from James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851
About:
James Cooper was born at Burlington, New Jersey on 15 Sep in 1789. His father was an ambitious judge who made a fortune in land development, and married another fortune. William Cooper packed up his family to move to his new project, Cooperstown, New York. James was sent to Yale at age thirteen, where he was expelled for his pranks in his junior year. He went to sea, first as a merchant seaman, then in the Navy. On his father's death, his newfound financial independence allowed him to leave the Navy and take up the life of the gentleman farmer. Disgusted with the book he was reading, he told his wife he could write better. She suggested he prove it, and though his first book was a failure, he became America's first novelist. He added Fenimore, his mother's maiden name, to his in 1826, the same year Last of the Mohicans was released.
The common faults of American language are an ambition of effect, a want of simplicity, and a turgid abuse of terms.
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.
Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannot congeal in winter.
The press, like fire, is an excellent servant, but a terrible master.
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 minority of a country is never known to agree, except in its efforts to reduce and oppress the majority.
...no civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law.
Systems are to be appreciated by their general effects, and not by particular exceptions.
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other.
Everybody says it, and what everybody says must be true.
The tendency of democracies is, in all things, to mediocrity.
- All from James Fenimore Cooper, 1789 - 1851
About:
James Cooper was born at Burlington, New Jersey on 15 Sep in 1789. His father was an ambitious judge who made a fortune in land development, and married another fortune. William Cooper packed up his family to move to his new project, Cooperstown, New York. James was sent to Yale at age thirteen, where he was expelled for his pranks in his junior year. He went to sea, first as a merchant seaman, then in the Navy. On his father's death, his newfound financial independence allowed him to leave the Navy and take up the life of the gentleman farmer. Disgusted with the book he was reading, he told his wife he could write better. She suggested he prove it, and though his first book was a failure, he became America's first novelist. He added Fenimore, his mother's maiden name, to his in 1826, the same year Last of the Mohicans was released.
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