Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Then out spake brave Horatius, The Captain of the Gate: To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods,

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

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.

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Thus spake brave Horatius, the captain of the gate. To all men upon this Earth, death cometh soon or late. And what better way to die, than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of ones' fathers, and the temples of ones' G/Ds. For the tender mother, who dandled him to rest. And for the wife, who nurses his baby at her breast. And for the holy maidens, who feed the eternal flame. To save them from false sextus, that wrought the deed of shame. Lay down the bridge, Sir Consul, with all the speed ye may. I, with two more at either side, shall hold the foe in play. In Yon straight path a thousand may well be stop by three. Now who will stand on either hand and hold the bridge with me?

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

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.

Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
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Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

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.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read

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.

American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.

[W]e are under a deception similar to that which misleads the traveler in the Arabian desert. Beneath the caravan all is dry and bare; but far in advance, and far in the rear, is the semblance of refreshing waters... A similar illusion seems to haunt nations through every stage of the long progress from poverty and barbarism to the highest degrees of opulence and civilization. But if we resolutely chase the mirage backward, we shall find it recede before us into the regions of fabulous antiquity. It is now the fashion to place the golden age of England in times when noblemen were destitute of comforts the want of which would be intolerable to a modern footman, when farmers and shopkeepers breakfasted on loaves the very sight of which would raise a riot in a modern workhouse, when to have a clean shirt once a week was a privilege reserved for the higher class of gentry, when men died faster in the purest country air than they now die in the most pestilential lanes of our towns, and when men died faster in the lanes of our towns than they now die on the coast of Guiana.

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We too shall in our turn be outstripped, and in our turn be envied. It may well be, in the twentieth century, that the peasant of Dorsetshire may think himself miserably paid with twenty shillings a week; that the carpenter at Greenwich may receive ten shillings a day; that laboring men may be as little used to dine without meat as they are now to eat rye bread; that sanitary police and

The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.

The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

Pour, varlet, pour the water
The water steaming hot!
A spoonful for each man of us
Another for the pot!

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.