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A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen and the gentlemen were not seamen.
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Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
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The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
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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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With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
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A government cannot be wrong in punishing fraud or force, but it is almost certain to be wrong if, abandoning its legitimate function, it tells private individuals that it knows their business better than they know it themselves.
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Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
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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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Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
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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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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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The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.
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People who take no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything worthy to be remembered with pride by remote descendants.
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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
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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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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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[I can] scarcely write upon mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of the science.
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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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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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