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Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Favourites’
Statesmen promise to make the country a better place, but they never mention the one thing that would do some good.
In Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance (1859), Scottish motivational writer Samuel Smiles attempted to stir ordinary citizens to self-improvement. He put very little faith in condescending speeches by well-heeled politicians promising to better the lot of the working classes. If the working man needed anything doing, he had better do it himself.
Samuel Smiles warned that taking care of the pennies should not come before taking care of living.
Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), like his later book Thrift (1875), urged readers to economise. He was not advocating penny-pinching, or becoming Ebenezer Scrooge. To him, thrift or economy was not really about saving money: it was about allocating money to things that matter, rather than things that don’t.
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
By the 1720s, there were already rumblings of discontent coming from England’s American colonies, but John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon warned against strictness from London. When government of a distant or culturally different people falls to your lot, the only way to keep them on side is to give them a mutually satisfactory degree of freedom and self-determination.
‘Alpha of the Plough’ wished that he had been born with the gift of a winning smile.
For many years, newspaper editor AG Gardiner wrote short essays for the Star under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough’. The following passage is taken from a reflection on the value of the smile, a reflection that ended with a warning. “Smiles,” he wrote, “like poets, are born, not made.”
William Cobbett was delighted with one young woman’s protest against Mr Pitt’s ingenious ways of raising money.
In 1784, the use of a horse for purposes other than farming was subjected to tax, one of Prime Minister William Pitt’s many ingenious tax-grabs. William Cobbett (who blamed the taxes on the national debt racked up by unnecessary wars) chuckled with delight nearly forty years later, when he stumbled across a farmer’s wife making a gentle protest.
Adam Smith contrasted the Government’s handling of the national economy with the way most families handled theirs.
By 1776, the long-standing policy of favouring British producers and blocking overseas competitors had raised prices, cost jobs, and only last year driven the American colonies to revolution. Adam Smith thought it both damaging and insulting, for the humblest tailor or cobbler could have told the Government that this was no way to run a budget.