Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800 – 1859)
Nineteenth century British poet, historian and Whig politician.
A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.
Was none who would be foremost
To lead such dire attack;
But those behind cried, "Forward!"
And those before cried, "Back!"
Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night;
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we played the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?
Many politicians lay it down as a self evident proposition that no people ought to be free until 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 until he had learned how to swim.
"I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia."
No sound of joy or sorrow
Was heard from either bank;
But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
With parted lips and straining eyes,
Stood gazing where he sank;
And when above the surges,
They saw his crest appear,
All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
And even the ranks of Tuscany
Could scarce forbear to cheer.
Now Roman is to Roman
More hateful than a foe;
And the Tribunes beard the high
and the fathers grind the low;
As we wax hot in faction,
In battle we wax cold;
And men fight not as they fought
In the brave days of old.
I wish I were as cocksure of anything as Tom Macaulay is of everything.
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 contentions of the Great Hall.
To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.
The ambassador [of Russia] and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.
"We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation."
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 pre-eminently.
Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.
Reform, that we may preserve.