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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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Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.
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The English doctrine that all power is a trust for the public good.
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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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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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The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
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In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
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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.
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He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.
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Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the great mass of men must have images. The strong tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to idolatry can be explained on no other principle.
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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.
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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.
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There is no country in Europe which is so easy to over-run as Spain there is no country which it is more difficult to conquer.
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The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
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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.
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The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.
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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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Generalization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
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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.
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Our judgment ripens our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
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It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.
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