Thomas B. Macaulay

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.”

“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.”

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

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

“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.”

“Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.”