As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
— Thomas Babington Macaulay
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.
Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.
Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
And to say that society ought to be governed by the opinion of the wisest and best, though true, is useless. Whose opinion is to decide who are the wisest and best?
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?
He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
He had a wonderful talent for packing thought close, and rendering it portable.
The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
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.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
Reform, that we may preserve.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
American democracy must be a failure because it places the supreme authority in the hands of the poorest and most ignorant part of the society.
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.
None of the modes by which a magistrate is appointed, popular election, the accident of the lot, or the accident of birth, affords, as far as we can perceive, much security for his being wiser than any of his neighbours.
Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!
The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
The English Bible - a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
The effect of violent dislike between groups has always created an indifference to the welfare and honor of the state.
Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.
People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.
Persecution produced its natural effect on them. It found them a sect; it made them a faction.
To punish a man because we infer from the nature of some doctrine which he holds, or from the conduct of other persons who hold the same doctrines with him, that he will commit a crime, is persecution, and is, in every case, foolish and wicked.
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
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.
Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.
Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.
