Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay

It is now time for us to pay a decent, a rational, a manly reverence to our ancestors, not by superstitiously adhering to what they, in other circumstances, did, but by doing what they, in our circumstances, would have done.

I have not the Chancellor's encyclopaedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything from the cedar to the hyssop.

That wonderful book [The Pilgrim's Progress], while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.

[I]f it is the moral right we are to look at, I say, that on every principle of moral obligation, I hold that the Jew has a right to political power.

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 …

His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

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.

It seems that the creative faculty, and the critical faculty, cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

Many politicians of our time 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 …

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

Many evils, no doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were the price of our liberty.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

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

As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

Our academical Pharisees.

Wherever literature consoles sorrow, or assuages pain,—wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal …

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

We know of no great revolution which might not have been prevented by compromise early and graciously made... [I]n all movements of the human mind which tend to great revolutions there is a crisis at which moderate concession may amend, …

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

Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of …

Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.