Top 100 Thomas B. Macaulay Quotes
#1. Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen pence a day; but for fantasy, planets and solar systems, will not suffice.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#5. Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#8. 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
#9. As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#10. In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#11. Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#16. 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
#18. We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
Thomas B. Macaulay
#20. 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
#21. I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#22. More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#23. I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#24. Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,
endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#26. 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
#27. With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#28. 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
#29. Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#30. Ambrose Phillips ... who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#31. A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#32. We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#35. 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
#36. A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#37. If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#38. 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
#39. A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. The impenetrable stupidity of Prince George (son-in-law of James II) served his turn. It was his habit, when any news was told him, to exclaim, "Est il possible?"-"Is it possible?"
Thomas B. Macaulay
#45. Was none who would be foremost
To lead such dire attack;
But those behind cried "Forward!"
And those before cried "Back!
Thomas B. Macaulay
#46. We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#47. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#48. A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
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. 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
#51. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#52. [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#54. The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#55. The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#56. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#61. Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#62. 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
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#74. We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#75. The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#76. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#77. Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#78. The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#79. 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
#81. The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#82. 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
#83. In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#84. I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#86. Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#87. 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
#88. Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#89. Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#90. Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#91. 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
#92. History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#93. Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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