Top 100 Thomas B. Macaulay Quotes
#1. Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#2. The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#3. We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#4. There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#5. We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#6. In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#7. We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#8. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#9. Then none was for a party; Than all were for the state; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great: Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold: The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#10. Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#11. The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#12. It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#13. In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#14. The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#15. [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#16. The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#17. In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#18. In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#23. That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#24. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#25. The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#27. The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it - The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#28. Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models; and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#30. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#31. More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#32. I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#33. In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#35. We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
Thomas B. Macaulay
#36. The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#37. Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#38. Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#39. Queen Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and play debts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon
Dr. Tillotson on Evil Speaking.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#40. In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#41. As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#42. People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#45. If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#46. The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#47. It is certain that satirical poems were common at Rome from a very early period. The rustics, who lived at a distance from the seat of government, and took little part in the strife of factions, gave vent to their petty local animosities in coarse Fescennine verse.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#48. In after-life you may have friends
fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#49. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#50. A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#51. Was none who would be foremost
To lead such dire attack;
But those behind cried "Forward!"
And those before cried "Back!
Thomas B. Macaulay
#52. No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#53. No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#54. What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,
and that is not only true, but identical,
that men always act from self-interest.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#55. Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#56. A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#57. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#58. Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe!
Thomas B. Macaulay
#60. The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#61. With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#63. All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#64. Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#65. Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#66. This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#67. I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#68. Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#69. The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#70. But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame,
Wilt not thou love me for myself alone?
Yes, thou wilt love me with exceeding love,
And I will tenfold all that love repay;
Still smiling, though the tender may reprove,
Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#71. If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of
Thomas B. Macaulay
#72. Lars Porsena of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrongs no more.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#73. This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#75. Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#76. A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#77. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#78. The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#79. The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#81. Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#82. It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#83. Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#84. The Orientals have another word for accident; it is "kismet,"
fate.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#86. It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#87. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#88. Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#89. From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,-a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#90. The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#91. Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school
its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#94. The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#95. There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#97. In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#98. The Saviour of mankind Himself, in whose blameless life malice could find no act to impeach, has been called in question for words spoken.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#99. There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
