Quotes by Thomas Macaulay

• He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
• Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
• People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
• Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
• Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
• Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.
• Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
• I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.
• I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.
• Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.
• He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.
• Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
• As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
• And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
• A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
• I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
• The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
• Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
• We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
• We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
• Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
• To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
• To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
• There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.
• There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
• Reform, that we may preserve.
• The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
• She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
• The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
• The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
• The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.
• The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
• That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
• Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
• A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
• An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.