Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington 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.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

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

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

Reform, that we may preserve.

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

- Thomas Babington Macaulay