Quote

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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thomas B. Macaulay
Popular
Madhouses
Countries
Restraints
Politics
Abolish
School
Unite
Government
Restraint
Country
Establish
Would
Governments
Madhouse
Absurd
Strait

More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

Image
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
Image
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
Image
A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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
Image
The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The highest eulogy which can be pronounced on the Revolution of 1688 is this that this was our last Revolution.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
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
Image
It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The good-humor of a man elated with success often displays itself towards enemies.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Image
What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.
Thomas B. Macaulay