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

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
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Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
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It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.
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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
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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 advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
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It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.
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There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
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The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
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There are countries in which it would be as absurd to establish popular governments as to abolish all the restraints in a school or to unite all the strait-waistcoats in a madhouse.
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I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.
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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.
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In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
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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.
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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 tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
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Then none was for a party Than all were for the state Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great: Then lands were fairly portioned Then spoils were fairly sold: The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old.
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There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
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