Quotes By Thomas B. Macaulay

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

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

Reform, that we may preserve.

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

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.

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.

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

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

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

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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