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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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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.
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Reform, that we may preserve.
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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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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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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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If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.
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Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
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We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
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What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
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With the dead there is no rivalry, with the dead there is no change.
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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 truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
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I am always nearest to myself, says the Latin proverb.
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Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.
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Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.
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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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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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Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.
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Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.
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The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.
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