Top 180 Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

152. “What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

153. “The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

154. “If the Sunday had not been observed as a day of rest during the last three centuries, I have not the slightest doubt that we should have been at this moment a poorer people and less civilized.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

155. “Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

156. “Ye diners out from whom we guard our spoons.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

157. “In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

158. “We do not think it necessary to prove that a quack medicine is poison; let the vender prove it to be sanative.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

159. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

160. “A dominant religion is never ascetic.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

161. “Thus our democracy was from an early period the most aristocratic, and our aristocracy the most democratic.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

162. “A beggarly people, A church and no steeple.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

163. “At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honorably distinguished for fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

164. “A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

165. “A kind of semi-Solomon, half-knowing everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

166. “Men of great conversational powers almost universally practise a sort of lively sophistry and exaggeration which deceives for the moment both themselves and their auditors.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

167. “Boswell is the first of biographers.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

168. “Such night in England ne’er had been, nor ne’er again shall be.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

169. “Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

170. “To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

171. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

172. “The effective strength of sects is not to be ascertained merely by counting heads.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

173. “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.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

174. “The whole history of Christianity proves that she has little indeed to fear from persecution as a foe, but much to fear from persecution as an ally.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

175. “Great minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

177. “The business of everybody is the business of nobody.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

178. “Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

179. “We never could clearly understand how it is that egotism, so unpopular in conversation, should be so popular in writing.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

180. “We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

181. “Genius is subject to the same laws which regulate the production of cotton and molasses.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

182. “I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

183. “We must succumb to the general influence of the times. No man can be of the tenth century, if he would; be must be a man of the nineteenth century.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

184. “The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

185. “Both in individuals and in masses violent excitement is always followed by remission, and often by reaction. We are all inclined to depreciate whatever we have overpraised, and, on the other hand, to show undue indulgence where we have shown undue rigor.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

186. “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!”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

187. “A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

188. “The sweeter sound of woman’s praise.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

189. “A few more years will destroy whatever yet remains of that magical potency which once belonged to the name of Byron.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

190. “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 Babington Macaulay

191. “The interests of large classes had been unfavourably affected by the establishment of the new diligences; and, as usual, many persons were, from mere stupidity and obstinacy, disposed to clamour against the innovation, simply because it was an innovation. It.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

192. “In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

193. “He had done that which could never be forgiven; he was in the grasp of one who never forgave.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

194. “First, a man of sense would have known that a single experiment is not sufficient to establish a general rule even in sciences much less complicated than the science of government; that, since the beginning of the world, no two political experiments were ever made of which all the conditions were exactly alike; and that the only way to learn civil prudence from history is to examine and compare an immense number of cases.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

195. “The more carefully we examine the history of the past, the more reason shall we find to dissent from those who imagine that our age has been fruitful of new social evils. The truth is that the evils are, with scarcely an exception, old. That which is new is the intelligence which discerns and the humanity which remedies them.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay

196. “The principle of copyright is this. It is a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers. The tax is an exceedingly bad one; it is a tax on one of the most innocent and most salutary of human pleasures; and never let us forget, that a tax on innocent pleasures is a premium on vicious pleasures.”

— Thomas Babington Macaulay