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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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The sweeter sound of woman's praise.
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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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It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, seditions, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.
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Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
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Reform, that we may preserve.
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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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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
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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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A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
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Our judgment ripens our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
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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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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
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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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Ambrose Phillips . . . who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.
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Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.
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Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.
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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.
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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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