Thomas B. Macaulay Quotes - Page 4

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

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.

I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God.

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.

How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.

At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.

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

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

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

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

A vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil terminates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady; the latter, constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender is lost, he too often flings the remainder of his virtue after it in despair.

No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.

A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.

The temple of silence and reconciliation.

I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.