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The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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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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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 who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
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The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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!
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Half-knowledge is worse than ignorance.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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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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Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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I am always nearest to myself, says the Latin proverb.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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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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A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay