Quotes from Thomas Babington Macaulay

Prizes given for subjects.

For the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement. Those who compare the age on which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in their 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

The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures.

At a dinner which a wealthy Alderman gave to some of the leading members of the government, the Lord Treasurer and the Lord Chancellor were so drunk that they stripped themselves almost stark naked, and were with difficulty prevented from climbing up a signpost to drink His Majesty's health.

No sophism is too gross to delude minds distempered by party spirit.

But when the face of Sextus Was seen among the foes, A yell that rent the firmament From all the town arose. On the house-tops was no woman But spat towards him and hissed, No child but screamed out curses, And shook its little fist.

Metternich told lies all the time, and never deceived any one; Talleyrand never told a lie and deceived the whole world.

Then out spake brave Horatius, the Captain of the Gate: "To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his Gods... Lays of Ancient Rome

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

By poetry we mean the art of employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words what the painter does by means of colours.

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

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

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.