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Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes — 15 Quotes by Thomas Babington Macaulay

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · Of Richard Steele, review of Aikin's Life of Addison (1843)

Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · Aged four, hot coffee having been spilt over his legs, in G. M. Trevelyan 'The Life and Letters of Macaulay' ch. 1.

The business of everybody is the business of nobody.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay · Southey's Colloquies on Society (1830)

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · Letter to H. S. Randall (May 23, 1857), on the American constitution

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

Thomas Babington Macaulay

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

Thomas Babington Macaulay · From the essay on Milton.

Reform, that you may preserve.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · Debate on the First Reform Bill (March 2, 1831)

Some traveler 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.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · The source reads: “She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigor when some traveler 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.” · On Ranke's History of the Popes (1840)

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

Thomas Babington Macaulay · The source reads: “Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.” · History of England (1849–1861), vol. I, ch. 1

Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

He was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.

Thank you, madam, the agony is abated.

The business of everybody is the business of nobody.

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

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

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

Knowledge advances by steps, and not by leaps.

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

Reform, that you may preserve.

Some traveler 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.

No man who is correctly informed as to the past will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.

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

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.

The highest intellects, like the tops of mountains, are the first to catch and to reflect the dawn.

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