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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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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.
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Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
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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.
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I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
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Satire is, indeed, the only sort of composition in which the Latin poets whose works have come down to us were not mere imitators of foreign models and it is therefore the sort of composition in which they have never been excelled.
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Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.
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The Orientals have another word for accident it is kismet,--fate.
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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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We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.
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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!
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The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
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The opinion of the great body of the reading public is very materially influenced even by the unsupported assertions of those who assume a right to criticize.
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In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.
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No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.
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It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.
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Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
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The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
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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!
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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