Quotes By Thomas B. Macaulay

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

Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

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

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

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

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

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

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

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?

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.

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.

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

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

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

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

Reform, that we may preserve.