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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.

Thomas B. Macaulay

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More quotes by 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.
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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularly is indispensable to the creations of the imagination. In proportion as men know more and think more they look less at individuals and more at classes. They therefore make better theories and worse poems.
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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.
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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.
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He had done that which could never be forgiven he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.
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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.
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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.
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The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
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There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen and the gentlemen were not seamen.
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Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
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Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,--endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity.
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In perseverance, in self command, in forethought, in all virtues which conduce to success in life, the Scots have never been surpassed.
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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.
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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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As freedom is the only safeguard of governments, so are order and moderation generally necessary to preserve freedom.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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A church is disaffected when it is persecuted, quiet when it is tolerated, and actively loyal when it is favored and cherished.
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Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
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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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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
Thomas B. Macaulay