Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

It is evident that many great and useful objects can be attained in this world only by cooperation. It is equally evident that there cannot be efficient cooperation if men proceed on the principle that they must not cooperate for one object unless they agree about other objects.

The measure of man’s real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.

It has often been found that profuse expenditures, heavy taxation, absurd commercial restrictions, corrupt tribunals, disastrous wars, sedition’s, persecutions, conflagrations, inundation, have not been able to destroy capital so fast as the exertions of private citizens have been able to create it.

A page digested is better than a volume hurriedly read.

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

This is the best book ever written by any man on the wrong side of a question of which he is profoundly ignorant.

I have no pleasure from books which equals that of reading over the hundredth time great productions which I almost know by heart.

Many of the greatest men that have ever lived have written biography. Boswell is one of the smallest men that ever lived and he has beaten them all.

Boswell is the first of biographers.

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