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

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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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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Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
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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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The end of government is the happiness of the people.
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Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
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Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.
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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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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
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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.
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The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.
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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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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
Thomas B. Macaulay