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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
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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 gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
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How it chanced that a man who reasoned on his premises so ably, should assume his premises so foolishly, is one of the great mysteries of human nature.
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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.
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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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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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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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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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The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
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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.
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
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The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
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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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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?
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We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would be must be a man of the nineteenth century.
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A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
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