It is not a very difficult task to make what is commonly called an amusing book of travels. Any one who will tell, with a reasonable degree of graphic effect, what he has seen, will not fail to carry the reader with him; for the interest we all feel in personal adventure is, of itself, success. James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
No civilized society can long exist, with an active power in its bosom that is stronger than the law. James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
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 Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
All sacrifices of common sense, and all recourse to plausible political combinations, whether of individuals or of men, are uniformly made at the expense of the majority. James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
I sometimes wish I had been educated a Catholic, in order to unite the poetry of religion with its higher principles. Are they necessarily inseparable? Is man really so much of a philosopher, that he can conceive of truth in its abstract purity, and divest life and the affections of all the aids of the imagination? James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party. James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
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 Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
Ignorance and superstition ever bear a close and mathematical relation to each other. James Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
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 Fenimore Cooper Read Quote
