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

Reform, that we may preserve.
Thomas B. Macaulay

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?
Thomas B. Macaulay

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.
Thomas B. Macaulay

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.
Thomas B. Macaulay

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.
Thomas B. Macaulay

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Thomas B. Macaulay

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.
Thomas B. Macaulay