Quotes from Thomas Babington Macaulay

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run though not to soar.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

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.

Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.

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

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.

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

American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.

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.

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

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

None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.

He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.

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

Reform, that we may preserve.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.