Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Obscurity and affectation are the two great faults of style. Obscurity of expression generally springs from confusion of ideas; and the same wish to dazzle, at any cost, which produces affectation in the manner of a writer, is likely to produce sophistry in his reasoning.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Style
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Government
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Knowledge
Will without power is like children playing at soldiers.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: One liners
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Religion
A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Religion
To punish a man because he has committed a crime, or because he is believed, though unjustly, to have committed a crime, is not persecution. 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Prejudice
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; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Education
As in every human character so in every transaction there is a mixture of good and evil: a little exaggeration, a little suppression, a judicious use of epithets, a watchful and searching skepticism with respect to the evidence on one side, a convenient credulity with respect to every report or tradition on the other, may easily make a saint of Laud, or a tyrant of Henry the Fourth.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Beliefs
History has its foreground and its background, and it is principally in the management of its perspective that one artist differs from another. Some events must be represented on a large scale, others diminished; the great majority will be lost in the dimness of the horizon, and a general idea of their joint effect will be given by a few slight touches.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
Children, look in those eyes, listen to that dear voice, notice the feeling of even a single touch that is bestowed upon you by that gentle hand! Make much of it while yet you have that most precious of all good gifts, a loving mother. Read the unfathomable love of those eyes; the kind anxiety of that tone and look, however slight your pain. 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Mother
Every age and 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Vice
I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Beliefs
The best histories may sometimes be 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Fiction
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Art, Painting, Painters
And she (the Roman Catholic Church) may still exist in undiminished vigor, 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Religion
A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Government
How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Brave
He alone reads history aright, who, observing how powerfully circumstances influence the feelings and opinions of men, how often vices pass into virtues, and paradoxes into axioms, learns to distinguish what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: History
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Manners, Politeness
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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Language
Many politicians lay 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.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Politicians, Politics, Freedom
There is a very pretty Eastern tale, of which the fate of plagiarists often reminds us. The slave of a magician saw his master wave his wand, and heard him give orders to the spirits who arose at the summons. The slave stole the wand, and waved it himself in the air; but he had not observed that his master used the left hand for that purpose. The spirits thus irregularly summoned, tore the thief to pieces instead of obeying his orders.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Plagiarism
Men naturally sympathize with the calamities of individuals; but they are inclined to look on a fallen party with contempt rather than with pity.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay
Topics: Party
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