Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,And be your oriflamme today the helmet of Navarre.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north,And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night;Whether we lost or won the game?

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Intoxicated with animosity.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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!

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Reform, that we may preserve.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

He [Richard Steele] was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

A man who has never looked on Niagra has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

There you [Sir Robert Peel] sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Forget all feuds, and shed one English tearO'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The sweeter sound of woman’s praise.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science—the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter—should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

These be the great Twin BrethrenTo whom the Dorians pray.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— 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

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Lars Porsena of ClosiumTo summon his array.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

Was none who would be foremostAnd those before cried, "Back!"

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

"Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber!Plunged headlong in the tide.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

No sound of joy or sorrowCould scarce forbear to cheer.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

When the goodman mends his armor, In the brave days of old.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

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

The ambassador [of Russia] and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.

— Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay