Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

“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.”

“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.”

“We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.”

“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?”

“A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.”

“Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.”

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

“The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.”

“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.”

“There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Then none was for a party;Then all were for the state;Then the great man helped the poor,And the poor man loved the great;Then lands were fairly proportioned;Then spoils were fairly sold;The Romans were like brothersIn the brave days of old.”

“Reform, that we may preserve.”

“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.”

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”

“Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.”

“Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.”

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