Top 100 Macaulay's Quotes
#1. In an article on Bunyan lately published in the "Contemporary Review" - the only article on the subject worth reading on the subject I ever saw (yes, thank you, I am familiar with Macaulay's patronizing prattle about "The Pilgrim's Progress") etc.
George Bernard Shaw
#2. My mother's father taught English literature. When I was about ten or eleven, I could recite Macaulay's 'Lays of Ancient Rome.' While other kids were playing pedestrian war games, I'd be Horatius keeping the bridge.
Bernie Taupin
#5. Michael Jackson and I talk all the time. I think we understand each other in a way that most people can't understand either of us.
Macaulay Culkin
#6. The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#7. The very utterness of the crash and ruin, the desperation of the case, might be its hope. On ruins one can begin to build. Anyhow, looking out from ruins one clearly sees; there are no obstructing walls.
Rose Macaulay
#8. It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.
Rose Macaulay
#9. News is like food: it is the cooking and serving that makes it acceptable, not the material itself.
Rose Macaulay
#10. [Religion is a] primitive insurance against disaster ... Originally religion was merely a function of the self-preservative instinct. Offer sacrifices to the gods and save your crops. And even Christianity, after all, insures heavily against the flaws in this life by belief in another.
Rose Macaulay
#11. He was so excited. He cut out pictures of these landscapes and neighborhoods and kind of really tried to give you a feel of the movie. It was kind of cute but at the same time it really showed his enthusiasm for it.
Macaulay Culkin
#12. The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.
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
#15. The great and recurrent question about Abroad is, is it worth the trouble of getting there?
Rose Macaulay
#17. Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.
Rose Macaulay
#18. The superior thing ... was to be late. Lateness showed that serene contempt for the illusion we call time which is so necessary to ensure the respect of others and oneself. Only the servile are punctual ...
Rose Macaulay
#19. A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.
Rose Macaulay
#20. Occasionally, I just need to escape from my work or be reminded of the comparative bliss of my own life, so I pick up a novel.
David Macaulay
#21. Giving is not at all interesting; but receiving is, there is no doubt about it, delightful.
Rose Macaulay
#22. 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
#23. If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#24. The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#25. At the worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived.
Rose Macaulay
#26. 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
#27. Mozart is everyone's tea, pleasing to highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows alike, though they probably all get different kinds of pleasure from him.
Rose Macaulay
#28. It's a place where I could do something on a weekly basis and see if I like it.
Macaulay Culkin
#29. I'd made enough made money by the time I was 12 to never work again, so it's not about a big pay check with me.
Macaulay Culkin
#31. It's about finding unique, one-of-a-kind films that I would want to see myself. I think 'Party Monster' is one of those.
Macaulay Culkin
#32. Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal ... unless she's really attractive.
Rose Macaulay
#33. 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
#34. There's a lot of focus on kids like Macaulay Culkin or others who had bad situations at some point in their careers and not enough focus on the people who do good like Natalie Portman or Claire Danes. It's hard for children to have these full-time jobs with all this responsibility.
Tia Mowry
#35. The last sin, the sin against the Holy Ghost - to lie to oneself. Lying to other people - that's a small thing in comparison.
Rose Macaulay
#36. They put it on the page because it sounded good or it looked good or they read it in a book somewhere that this is how you structure a script or something, and they just don't get it. It's surprising.
Macaulay Culkin
#37. I have a lot of growing up to do, or a lot of growing down. I think that's probably more appropriate.
Macaulay Culkin
#38. Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear; Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea; What is my tail cut off? A rushing river; And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#39. I did 14 movies in six years, I had a cartoon TV show, and I don't want to do that again. I just want to make unique pieces of art. That's why I quit everything when I was 14 and sat around for eight years before I did another movie.
Macaulay Culkin
#40. I enjoy my life. I think I have a very good life. And I think I'm very satisfied with the direction of my career and just my lifestyle and everything like that. So I wouldn't change a single thing.
Macaulay Culkin
#41. It's like, I don't think you understand, Michael Jackson's bedroom is two stories and it has, like, three bathrooms and this and that. So, when I slept in his bedroom, yes, but you understand the whole scenario.
Macaulay Culkin
#42. A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#43. I have no control over people's perceptions of me at all and that's one of the things I decided very early on is that I can't control the way other people think of me. All I can do, especially when it comes to my career is go out there and do cool unique kinds of things.
Macaulay Culkin
#44. I don't even know how to define myself. I'm a person who writes. It's something I enjoy, and hopefully people enjoy it as well.
Macaulay Culkin
#45. We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
Thomas B. Macaulay
#46. One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.
Rose Macaulay
#48. We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.
Rose Macaulay
#49. 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
#52. 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
#54. He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#55. I could hardly wait for following chapters, which arrived in dribs and drabs, and I began to feel for all the world like the young T.B. Macaulay walking from London to meet the Cambridge coach bearing the next installment of Waverley novels.
Vernon Sproxton
#56. I do have a family, and I do have friends, and so-called friends, and acquaintances, and many other people I see only around Christmas time. Maybe they could vouch for me. Maybe they could testify to my existence and save a part of me that thinks I'm no better than a bag of potato chips.
Macaulay Culkin
#57. A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#58. Life is one long struggle to disinter oneself, to keep one's head above the accumulations, the ever deepening layers of objects ... which attempt to cover one over, steadily, almost irresistibly, like falling snow.
Rose Macaulay
#59. How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#60. So they left the subject and played croquet, which is a very good game for people who are annoyed with one another, giving many opportunities for venting rancor.
Rose Macaulay
#61. 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
#63. I've led a very isolated existence since I was 6 years old. It's kind of been me and my mind.
Macaulay Culkin
#64. 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
#65. 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
#67. The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#68. Words move, turning over like tumbling clowns; like certain books and like fleas, they possess activity. All men equally have the right to say, 'This word shall bear this meaning,' and see if they can get it across. It is a sporting game, which all can play, only all cannot win.
Rose Macaulay
#71. I lead a simple life. I feed the fish. I walk the dogs. I cook dinner. Occasionally I take a meeting.
Macaulay Culkin
#72. We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#73. For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of a Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a MaCaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinocerus.
Ethel Barrymore
#74. The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#75. I seldom meet actors, they are to me bright strange fishes swimming in an element alien to me; I feel that to meet them is to See Life.
Rose Macaulay
#76. Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#77. I may play the fool at times, but I'm more than just a pretty blond boy with an ass that won't quit.
Charles Macaulay
#78. It is to the eccentrics that the world owes most of its knowledge.
Rose Macaulay
#79. I can go to any restaurant without a reservation, but while I'm there, everyone's gonna be staring.
Macaulay Culkin
#80. It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well.
Antonia Fraser
#81. They ... threw themselves into the interests of the rest, but each plowed his or her own furrow. Their thoughts, their little passions and hopes and desires, all ran along separate lines. Family life is like this - animated, but collateral.
Rose Macaulay
#82. Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#83. Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.
Rose Macaulay
#84. People do bad things in their lives. And those sort of things are forgivable. That's half the point of having confession in church - you need to be able to fess up to what you've done.
Macaulay Culkin
#85. The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#86. He felt about books as doctors feel about medicines, or managers about plays
cynical but hopeful.
Rose Macaulay
#87. 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
#88. Churches are wonderful and beautiful, and they are vehicles for religion, but no Church can have more than a very little of the truth.
Rose Macaulay
#89. It drives me crazy when your parents try to read your mind. It's even worse when they try to read your mail.
Macaulay Culkin
#90. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#94. Decades have a delusive edge to them. They are not, of course, really periods at all, except as any other ten years may be. But we, looking at them, are caught by the different name each bears, and give them different attributes, and tie labels on them, as if they were flowers in a border.
Rose Macaulay
#95. There's more to me, you know? I'm not Macaulay Culkin, 'Home Alone' kid. I'm Macaulay Culkin ... actor.
Macaulay Culkin
#96. If an alien race lands on the planet Earth tomorrow and asks me to prove I'm really here, what do I do? What do I give them? What do I tell them? What do I show them? I can't sing or dance. I can't paint. I've never built anything, and I've never contributed anything significant to the human race.
Macaulay Culkin
#97. 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
#98. People still recognize me all the time on the street. The first thing they say when they stop me is, 'Where have you been?' The second comment they make is always, 'Oh, you've grown up.'
Macaulay Culkin
#99. 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
#100. We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
Thomas Babington Macaulay
