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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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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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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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In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
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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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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
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The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
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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No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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!
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay