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Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
Half
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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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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
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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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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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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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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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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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Only imagine a man acting for one single day on the supposition that all his neighbors believe all that they profess, and act up to all that they believe!
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A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
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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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There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
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A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Oh, wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north, With your hands, and your feet, and your raiment all red? And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout? And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
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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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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize.
Thomas B. Macaulay