J. C. Macaulay Quotes

Every political sect has its esoteric and its exoteric school--its abstract doctrines for the initiated; its visible symbols, its imposing forms, its mythological fables, for the vulgar.

The perfect disinterestedness and self-devotion of which men seem incapable, but which is sometimes found in women.

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.

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.

With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.

It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

I wish I was as sure of anything as he is of everything.

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

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

Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.

We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!

Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.

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

A dominant religion is never ascetic.

Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.

Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.

Complete self-devotion is woman's part.

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.

The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.

Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.

Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe!

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.

What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.

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.

Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.

We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.

A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.

In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.

Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.

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.

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.

With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.

A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.

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

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.

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

Lars Porsena of Clusium By the Nine Gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrongs no more.

A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.