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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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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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It is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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!
Thomas B. Macaulay
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
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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To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison let the vender prove it to be sanative.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Western literature has been more influenced by the Bible than any other book.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Language is the machine of the poet.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The impenetrable stupidity of Prince George (son-in-law of James II) served his turn. It was his habit, when any news was told him, to exclaim, Est il possible?-Is it possible?
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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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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With respect to the doctrine of a future life, a North American Indian knows just as much as any ancient or modern philosopher.
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay