Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes (40 Quotes)

What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries.

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.

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.

The business of everybody is the business of nobody.

We see no reason for thinking that the opinions of the magistrate on speculative questions are more likely to be right than those of any other man. 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 neighbors. The chance of his being wiser than all his neighbors together is still smaller.

Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.

Lars Porsena of Clusium By the nine gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more.

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

In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.

That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.

He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour's wife.

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

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

She the Roman Catholic Church may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.

Re Robert Montgomerys Poems His writing bears the same relation to poetry which a Turkey carpet bears to a picture. There are colours in the Turkey carpet out of which a picture might be made. There are words in Mr. Montgomerys writing which, when disposed in certain orders and combinations,have made, and will make again, good poetry. But, as they now stand, they seem to be put together on principle in such a manner as to give no image of anything in the heavens above, or in the earth beneath, or in the waters under the earth.

We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.

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

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 colors.

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.

The object of oratory is not truth but persuasion.

Ambrose Phillips ... who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.

I have not the Chancellor's encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.

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

The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

But those behind cried 'Forward' And those before cried 'Back'.

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

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.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

It is the nature of man to overrate present evil and to underrate present good to long for what he has not, and to be dissatisfied with what he has.

And even the ranks of Tuscany Could scarce forbear to cheer.

The sweeter sound of woman's praise.

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 possible to be below flattery as well as above it.

Cunning is the natural and universal defense of the weak Against the violence of the strong.

These be the great Twin Brethren To whom the Dorians pray.

The essence of war is violence.