A man who should act, for one day, on the supposition that all the people about him were influenced by the religion which they professed would find himself ruined by night.
Thomas B. MacaulayGeneralization is necessary to the advancement of knowledge; but particularity is indispensable to the creations of the imagination.
Thomas B. MacaulayGreat minds do indeed react on the society which has made them what they are; but they only pay with interest what they have received.
Thomas B. MacaulayIn the infancy of civilization, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched roofed hut stood on what was later the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets.
Thomas B. Macaulay