Thomas b. macaulay quotes

Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.

War is never lenient but where it is wanton; where men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge. This may be bad, but it is human nature; it is the clay as it came from the hands of the Potter.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

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

I am always nearest to myself," says the Latin proverb.

As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.

The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.

And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?

History begins in novel and ends in essay.

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.

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

The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.

Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

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

It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.

The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.

A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.

Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law, and by observing strict economy in every department of the state. Let the Government do this: the People will assuredly do the rest.

The best portraits are perhaps those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature; and we are not certain that the best histories are not those in which a little of the exaggeration of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed. Something is lost in accuracy; but much is gained in effect. The fainter lines are neglected; but the great characteristic features are imprinted on the mind forever.

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.

Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in 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 temple of silence and reconciliation.

Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.

More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.

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.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance to him.

In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

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!

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

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

In the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.

The hearts of men are their books; events are their tutors; great actions are their eloquence.

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

How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

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

The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.

Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.

The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.

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

How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.

Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

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.

I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.

People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.

To carry the spirit of peace into war is a weak and cruel policy. When an extreme case calls for that remedy which is in its own nature most violent, and which, in such cases, is a remedy only because it is violent, it is idle to think of mitigating and diluting. Languid war can do nothing which negotiation or submission will do better: and to act on any other principle is, not to save blood and money, but to squander them.

There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain; there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.

Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity.

At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.

A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.

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.

Then none was for a party; Than all were for the state; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great: Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold: The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

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

When the great Kepler bad at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed: "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity or by my contemporaries is a matter that concerns them more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God Himself, during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself.

Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.

A perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque; yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own. He must be a profound and ingenious reasoner; yet he must possess sufficient self-command to abstain from casting his facts in the mould of his hypothesis.

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

Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.

I have long been convinced that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.

Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.

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.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.

I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.

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

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

By poetry we mean the art of employing of 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 colors.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

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.

The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

We deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. But the more violent the outrages, the more assured we feel that a revolution was necessary.

It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.

History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.

Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.

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.

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

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.

The business of everybody is the business of nobody.

Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.

Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.

Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.

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.

If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.

I don't mind your thinking slowly; I mind your publishing faster than you think.

The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.

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

A vice sanctioned by the general opinion is merely a vice. The evil terminates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a pernicious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady; the latter, constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender is lost, he too often flings the remainder of his virtue after it in despair.

Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

No war ought ever to be undertaken but under circumstances which render all intercourse of courtesy between the combatants impossible. It is a bad thing that men should hate each other; but it is far worse that they should contract the habit of cutting one another's throats without hatred. War is never lenient but where it is wanton; when men are compelled to fight in self-defence, they must hate and avenge: this may be bad; but it is human nature.

So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.

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.