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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?

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
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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.
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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
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The Spartan, smiting and spurning the wretched Helot, moves our disgust. But the same Spartan, calmly dressing his hair, and uttering his concise jests, on what the well knows to be his last day, in the pass of Thermopylae, is not to be contemplated without admiration.
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He had done that which could never be forgiven he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.
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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.
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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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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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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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Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
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The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
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The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.
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Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
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In the modern languages there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books.
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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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