212 Quotes by Thomas Babington Macaulay

It is possible to be below flattery as well as above it. One who trusts nobody will not trust sycophants. One who does not value real glory will not value its counterfeit.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.

A system in which the two great commandments are to hate your neighbor and to love your neighbor’s wife.

More sinners are cursed at not because we despise their sins but because we envy their success at sinning.

To be a really good historian is perhaps the rarest of intellectual distinctions.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

The ascendency of the sacerdotal order was long the ascendency which naturally and properly belonged to intellectual superiority.

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.