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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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It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected in the Sanskrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the paltry abridgements used at preparatory schools in England.
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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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The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
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All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Ambrose Phillips . . . who had the honor of bringing into fashion a species of composition which has been called, after his name, Namby Pamby.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Byron owed the vast influence which he exercised over his contemporaries at least as much to his gloomy egotism as to the real power of his poetry.
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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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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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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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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Even Holland and Spain have been positively, though not relatively, advancing.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
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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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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By poetry we mean the art of employing of words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the imagination the art of doing by means of words, what the painter does by means of colors.
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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What proposition is there respecting human nature which is absolutely and universally true? We know of only one,--and that is not only true, but identical,--that men always act from self-interest.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Thomas B. Macaulay