Thomas Babington Macaulay quotes:

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.

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

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 voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve

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

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.

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

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

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.

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Boswell is the first of biographers

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

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

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