Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

208 Sourced Quotes

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness—a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
How odd that people of sense should find any pleasure in being accompanied by a beast who is always spoiling conversation.
Of dogs

Thomas Babington Macaulay
What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Thomas Babington Macaulay
When the goodman mends his armor,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,
How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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
On the day of the accession of George the Third, the ascendancy of the Whig party terminated; and on that day the purification of the Whig party began.

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
I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
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 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
It was a crime in a child to read by the bedside of a sick parent one of those beautiful collects which had soothed the griefs of forty generations of Christians.
Of the book of common prayer

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Thus our democracy was, from an early period, the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic in the world.

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
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
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... who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim.

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

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.

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
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
Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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
The harvests of Arretium,
This year, old men shall reap.
This year, young boys in Umbro
Shall plunge the struggling sheep;
And in the vats of Luna,
This year, the must shall foam
Round the white feet of laughing girls
Whose sires have marched to Rome.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
She [the Catholic Church] thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay