Thomas B. Macaulay Quotes - Page 9

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

A few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio Populi to the dust and silence of the upper shelf... For a month or two it will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing-room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it will then be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming novelties.

The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.

He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.

The sweeter sound of woman's praise.

Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.

Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.

The end of government is the happiness of the people.

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.

There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him; he changed his mind, and went to the oars.

The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.

Ye diners out from whom we guard our spoons.

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

Boswell is the first of biographers.

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.

To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. 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.

It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame, Wilt not thou love me for myself alone? Yes, thou wilt love me with exceeding love, And I will tenfold all that love repay; Still smiling, though the tender may reprove, Still faithful, though the trusted may betray.

The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.

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.