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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
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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!
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This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.
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Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.
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That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
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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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What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!-To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
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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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He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
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Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.
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A single breaker may recede but the tide is evidently coming in.
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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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The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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