Thomas B. Macaulay Quotes

125 quotes in 1707 categories

• It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
• 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.…
• A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor's wife.
• 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…
• The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
• 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…
• 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…
• Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
• 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…
• Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which…
• 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…
• [I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
• The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.
• With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.
• The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
• She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
• 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…
• A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
• The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it - The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing…
• We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

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