Thomas Babington Macaulay - Man Quotes

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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
Every man who has seen the world knows that nothing is so useless as a general maxim.... If, like those of Rochefoucault, it be sparkling and whimsical, it may make an excellent motto for an essay. But few, indeed, of the many wise apophthegms which have been uttered from the time of the Seven Sages of Greece to that of Poor Richard have prevented a single foolish action.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of

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
Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe!

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

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
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
Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

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
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
I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!—To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!

Thomas Babington Macaulay
No man is fit to govern great societies who hesitates about disobliging the few who have access to him for the sake of the many he will never see.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
And the Man of Blood was there, with his long essenced hair,
And Astley, and Sir Marmaduke, and Rupert of the Rhine.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Then none was for a party,
Then all were for the state;
Then the rich man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly portioned,
Then spoils were fairly sold;
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old. Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe;
And the Tribunes beard the high
and the fathers grind the low;
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold;
And men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.

Thomas Babington Macaulay
A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay
Let no man stop to plunder,
But slay, and slay, and slay;
The Gods who live for ever
Are on our side to-day.

Thomas Babington Macaulay