Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

To every man upon this earth Death cometh soon or late. And how can man die better Than facing fearful odds, For the ashes of his fathers, And the temples of his gods

The harvests of Arretium, This year, old men shall reap; This year, young boys in Umbro Shall plunge the struggling sheep; And in the vats of Luna, This year, the must shall foam

Lars Porsena of Closium By the Nine Gods he swore That the great house of Tarquin Should suffer wrong no more. By the Nine Gods he swore it, And named a trysting day,

The sweeter sound of woman's praise.

I say that where the public morality is concerned it may be the duty of the State to interfere with the contracts of individuals... It must then, I think, be admitted that, where health is concerned, and where morality is concerned, the …

Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.

There you [Sir Robert Peel] sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years.

A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to …

I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.

The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.

He [Richard Steele] was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.

We hardly know any instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking, and so grotesque, as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against …

In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.

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.

Our readers will remember that, in 1825, the Catholic Association raised the cry of emancipation with most formidable effect. The Tories acted after their kind. Instead of removing the grievance they tried to put down the agitation.

Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil …

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 …

The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.

She [the Catholic Church] thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.

Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa.

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from …

Till Belvoir’s lordly terraces the sign to Lincoln sent, And Lincoln sped the message on o’er the wide vale of Trent; Till Skiddaw saw the fire that burned on Gaunt’s embattled pile, And the red glare on Skiddaw roused the burghers of …