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The upper current of society presents no pertain criterion by which we can judge of the direction in which the under current flows.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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Thomas B. Macaulay
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More quotes by Thomas B. Macaulay

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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.
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.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Language is the machine of the poet.
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He [Charles II] was utterly without ambition. He detested business, and would sooner have abdicated his crown than have undergone the trouble of really directing the administration.
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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Mere negation, mere Epicurean infidelity, as Lord Bacon most justly observes, has never disturbed the peace of the world. It furnishes no motive for action it inspires no enthusiasm it has no missionaries, no crusades, no martyrs.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The most beautiful object in the world, it will be allowed, is a beautiful woman.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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We must judge of a form of government by it's general tendency, not by happy accidents
Thomas B. Macaulay
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A single breaker may recede but the tide is evidently coming in.
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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He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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This is the highest miracle of genius, that things which are not should be as though they were, that the imaginations of one mind should become the personal recollections of another.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
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
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Cut off my head, and singular I am, Cut off my tail, and plural I appear Although my middle's left, there's nothing there! What is my head cut off? A sounding sea What is my tail cut off? A rushing river And in their mingling depths I fearless play, Parent of sweetest sounds, yet mute forever.
Thomas B. Macaulay
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Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
Thomas B. Macaulay