List of Harriet Martineau Quotes

Who Is Apt, On Occasion, To Assign A Multitude Of Reasons When One Will Do? This Is A Sure Sign Of Weakness In Argument.

[i] Wish That The Land-tax Went A Little More According To Situation Than It Does. 'tis Really Ridiculous, How One Has To Pay Five Times As Much As Another, Without Any Reason That Ever I Heard Tell.

There Are Always Principles To Be Depended Upon In This Matter Of Taxation ... Amidst The Inconsistent, The Bewildering Representations Offered, A Certain Number Must Be In Accordance With True Principles.

I Have Suffered, Like Other Writers, From Indolence, Irresolution, Distaste To My Work, Absence Of 'inspiration,' And All That: But I Have Also Found That Sitting Down, However Reluctantly, With The Pen In My Hand, I Have Never Worked For One Quarter Of An Hour Without Finding Myself In Full Train.

Of Tobacco And Its Consequences, I Will Say Nothing But That The Practice Is At Too Bad A Pass To Leave Hope That Anything That Could Be Said In Books Would Work A Cure. If The Floors Of Boarding-houses, And The Decks Of Steam-boats, And The Carpets Of The Capitol, Do Not Sicken The Americans Into A Reform; If The Warnings Of Physicians Are Of No Avail, What Remains To Be Said? I Dismiss The Nauseous Subject.

If The National Mind Of America Be Judged Of By Its Legislation, It Is Of A Very High Order ... If The American Nation Be Judged Of By Its Literature, It May Be Pronounced To Have No Mind At All.

Even If Their Outward Fortunes Could Be Absolutely Equalized, There Would Be, From Individual Constitution Alone, An Aristocracy And A Democracy In Every Land. The Fearful By Nature Would Compose An Aristocracy, The Hopeful By Nature A Democracy, Were All Other Causes Of Divergence Done Away.

There Is No Death To Those Who Perfectly Love-only Disappearance, Which In Time May Be Borne.

For My Own Part, I Had Rather Suffer Any Inconvenience From Having To Work Occasionally In Chambers And Kitchenthan Witness The Subservience In Which The Menial Class Is Held In Europe.

We Do Not Believe In Immortality Because We Can't Prove It, But We Try To Prove It Because We Cannot Help Believing It.

It Is Characteristic Of Genius To Be Hopeful And Aspiring. It Is Characteristic Of Genius To Break Up The Artificial Arrangements Of Conventionalism, And To View Mankind In True Perspective, In Their Gradations Of Inherent Rather Than Of Adventitious Worth. Genius Is Therefore Essentially Democratic, And Has Always Been So.

Fidelity To Conscience Is Inconsistent With Retiring Modesty. If It Be So, Let The Modesty Succumb. It Can Be Only A False Modesty Which Can Be Thus Endangered.