Thomas B. Macaulay

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.

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

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

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

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

A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

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

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

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

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

It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it.

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

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources.

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

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

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

If ever Shakespeare rants, it is not when his imagination is hurrying him along, but when he is hurrying his imagination along.

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.

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.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

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.

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

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

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

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.

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

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

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

Reform, that we may preserve.

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

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

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

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

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

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

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

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.

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

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.

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

More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.