A good constitution is infinitely better than the best despot.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

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 B. Macaulay Quote

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.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

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.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

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.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

The best portraits are those in which there is a slight mixture of caricature.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

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.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

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 B. Macaulay Quote

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.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.
- Thomas B. Macaulay Quote