Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Profession : Poet

Birth : October 25, 1800

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

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington 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

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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?

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Reform, that we may preserve.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington 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

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

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.

Thomas Babington Macaulay