Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

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Lars Porsena of Closium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it,
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and west and south and north,
To summon his array.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?

Thomas Babington Macaulay
If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action; it inspires no enthusiasm; it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
A man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.

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

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
A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question: all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must. And if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
It was before Deity embodied in a human form walking among men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of the synagogue, and the doubts of the academy, and the pride of the portico, and the fasces of the lictor, and the swords of thirty legions were humbled in the dust.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Poetry effects its purpose most completely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of certainty become more and more definite, and the shades of probability more and more distinct, the hues and lineaments of the phantoms which it calls up grow fainter and fainter.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgement used at preparatory schools in England.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Bishop Watson compares a geologist to a gnat mounted on an elephant, and laying down theories as to the whole internal structure of the vast animal from the phenomena of the hide. The comparison is unjust to the geologist.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Facts are the mere dross of history. It is from the abstract truth which interpenetrates them, and lies latent among them, like gold in the ore, that the mass derives its whole value; and the precious particles are generally combined with the baser in such a manner that the separation is a task of the utmost difficulty.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize.

Thomas Babington Macaulay