Top 52 Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes
#2. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#3. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#6. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#7. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#8. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#10. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries ... and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#14. Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#15. The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#17. There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#18. To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#19. People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#20. 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,
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#22. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#23. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#24. Pour, varlet, pour the water
The water steaming hot!
A spoonful for each man of us
Another for the pot!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#25. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#26. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#28. 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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Thomas Babington Macaulay
#29. She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#33. Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#35. Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#40. 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?
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#42. The Puritans hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#43. 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!
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#44. That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#45. None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#46. The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#47. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#48. 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?
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#49. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#50. We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#51. Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
#52. 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.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
