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

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Spectacle
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
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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.
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Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
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Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
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He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
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As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
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To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
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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.
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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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?
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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!
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A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.
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Was none who would be foremost To lead such dire attack But those behind cried Forward! And those before cried Back!
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