Quotes from Thomas B. Macaulay

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

Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.

Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.

What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,--and that is not only true, but identical,--that men always act from self-interest.

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

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

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the 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.

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.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

The maxim that people should not have a right till they are ready to exercise it properly, is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

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 perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.

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.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.

Everybody's business is nobody's business.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.