Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
"To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods, And for the tender mother
Who dandled him to rest,
And for the wife who nurses
His baby at her breast,
And for the holy maidens
Who feed the eternal flame,
To save them from false Sextus
That wrought the deed of shame?"

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

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 Babington Macaulay
The gigantic body, the huge massy face, seamed with the scars of disease, the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 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
Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.

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
He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Obadiah Bind-their-kings-in-chains-and-their-nobles-with-links-of-iron.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 Babington Macaulay
To my true king I offered free from stain
Courage and faith; vain faith, and courage vain.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 Babington Macaulay
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
He [Richard Rumbold] never would believe that Providence had sent a few men into the world ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Biographers, translators, editors, all, in short, who employ themselves in illustrating the lives or writings of others, are peculiarly exposed to the Lues Boswelliana, or disease of admiration.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colors.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

Thomas Babington Macaulay