Top 180 Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

102. “History begins in novel and ends in essay.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

103. “A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

104. “The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

105. “I have not the smallest doubt that, if we had a purely democratic government here, the effect would be the same. Either the poor would plunder the rich, and civilisation would perish; or order and property would be saved by a strong military government, and liberty would perish.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

106. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

107. “The business of the dramatist is to keep himself out of sight, and to let nothing appear but his characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his personal feelings, the illusion is broken.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

108. “In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

109. “The reluctant obedience of distant provinces generally costs more than it – The Territory is worth. Empires which branch out widely are often more flourishing for a little timely pruning.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

110. “Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

111. “The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

112. “That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

113. “She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

114. “The passages in which Milton has alluded to his own circumstances are perhaps read more frequently, and with more interest, than any other lines in his poems.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

115. “No man in the world acts up to his own standard of right.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

116. “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 Babington Macaulay

117. “There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

118. “The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

119. “The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets. Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

120. “People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

121. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

122. “The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

123. “He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

124. “A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

125. “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 Babington Macaulay

126. “I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

127. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

128. “In Plato’s opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon’s opinion, philosophy was made for man.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

129. “We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

130. “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 Babington Macaulay

131. “Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

132. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

133. “Man is so inconsistent a creature that it is impossible to reason from his beliefs to his conduct, or from one part of his belief to another.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

134. “If any person had told the Parliament which met in terror and perplexity after the crash of 1720 that in 1830 the wealth of England would surpass all their wildest dreams, that the annual revenue would equal the principal of that debt which they considered an intolerable burden, that for one man of.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

135. “Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

136. “The desire of posthumous fame and the dread of posthumous reproach and execration are feelings from the influence of which scarcely any man is perfectly free, and which in many men are powerful and constant motives of action.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

137. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

138. “It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

139. “The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

140. “It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

141. “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 Babington Macaulay

142. “He who, in an enlightened and literary society, aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little child.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

143. “The end of government is the happiness of the people.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

144. “In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

145. “Power, safely defied, touches its downfall.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

146. “It is good to be often reminded of the inconsistency of human nature, and to learn to look without wonder or disgust on the weaknesses which are found in the strongest minds.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

147. “The Church is the handmaid of tyranny and the steady enemy of liberty.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

148. “The maxim, that governments ought to train the people in the way in which they should go, sounds well. But is there any reason for believing that a government is more likely to lead the people in the right way than the people to fall into the right way of themselves?”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

149. “More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

150. “Reform, that we may preserve.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay