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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
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The end of government is the happiness of the people.
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Beards in olden times, were the emblems of wisdom and piety.
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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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At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.
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Finesse is the best adaptation of means to circumstances.
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If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king.
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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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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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The real object of the drama is the exhibition of human character.
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The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
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What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
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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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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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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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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 object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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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.
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