Thomas B. Macaulay May Quotations

No particular man is necessary to the state. We may depend on it that, if we provide the country with popular institutions, those institutions will provide it with great men.

A single breaker may recede; but the tide is evidently coming in.

In truth it may be laid down as an almost universal rule that good poets are bad critics.

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

It may be laid as an universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less.

There is surely no contradiction in saying that a certain section of the community may be quite competent to protect the persons and property of the rest, yet quite unfit to direct our opinions, or to superintend our private habits.

Reform, that we may preserve.

In after-life you may have friends--fond, dear friends; but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which none but a mother bestows.

A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question: all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must. And if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully.

A history in which every particular incident may be true may on the whole be false.