Thomas B. Macaulay
People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.Collection: Pride
History, is made up of the bad actions of extraordinary men and woman. All the most noted destroyers and deceivers of our species, all the founders of arbitrary governments and false religions have been extraordinary people; and nine tenths of the calamities that have befallen the human race had no other origin than the union of high intelligence with low desires.Collection: Men
The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.Collection: Enemy
More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.Collection: Envy
A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.Collection: Pages
Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.Collection: Life
A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.Collection: Government
In the plays of Shakespeare man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn.Collection: Passion
The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me; for it is your duty to tolerate truth. But when I am the stronger I shall persecute you; for it is my duty to persecute error.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Peace
No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.Collection: Past
The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.Collection: Beauty
We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point, that we have seen our best days. But so said all before us, and with just as much apparent reason.Collection: Errors
No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.Collection: Men
It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds.Collection: Humanity
In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.Collection: Age
Even the law of gravitation would be brought into dispute were there a pecuniary interest involved.Collection: Money
The merit of poetry, in its wildest forms, still consists in its truth-truth conveyed to the understanding, not directly by the words, but circuitously by means of imaginative associations, which serve as its conductors.Collection: Mean
Re: Robert Montgomery's 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. Montgomery's 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.Collection: Writing
The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize.Collection: Reading
So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate.Collection: Art
Those who have read history with discrimination know the fallacy of those panegyrics and invectives which represent individuals as effecting great moral and intellectual revolutions, subverting established systems, and imprinting a new character on their age. The difference between one man and another is by no means so great as the superstitious crowd suppose.Collection: Character
Everybody's business is nobody's business.Collection: Business
Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.Collection: Clamor
A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.Collection: Years
A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.Collection: Art
Language is the machine of the poet.Collection: Machines
We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.Collection: Race
Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.Collection: Hands
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.Collection: Strength
The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.Collection: Powerful
We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.Collection: Government
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!Collection: Destiny
But the time will come when New England will be as thickly peopled as old England. Wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much with you as with us. You will have your Manchesters and Birminghams; and, in those Manchesters and Birminghams, hundreds of thousands of artisans will assuredly be sometimes out of work. Then your institutions will be fairly brought to the test.Collection: Wages
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.Collection: Life
Queen Mary had a way of interrupting tattle about elopements, duels, and play debts, by asking the tattlers, very quietly yet significantly, whether they had ever read her favorite sermon--Dr. Tillotson on Evil Speaking.Collection: Queens
Scotland by no means escaped the fate ordained for every country which is connected, but not incorporated, with another country of greater resources.Collection: Country
This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.Collection: Imagination
What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.Collection: Want
Sense can support herself handsomely in most countries on some eighteen pence a day; but for fantasy, planets and solar systems, will not suffice.Collection: Country
We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.Collection: Men
The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.Collection: Drama
The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.Collection: Justice
Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.Collection: Retirement
Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.Collection: Law
To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.Collection: Intellectual
In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.Collection: Christian
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.Collection: Knowledge
Office of itself does much to equalize politicians. It by no means brings all characters to a level; but it does bring high characters down and low characters up towards a common standard.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Love