Quotes from Thomas B. Macaulay

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

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.

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

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

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.

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.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.

Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this moment any choice in life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries...and never pass a waking hour without a book before me.

The Saviour of mankind Himself, in whose blameless life malice could find no act to impeach, has been called in question for words spoken.

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it - The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

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

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.

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

In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

In after-life you may have friends--fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.

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!

What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.