1820s

• Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,
  And be your oriflamme today the helmet of Navarre.
  • Ivry: A Song of the Huguenots, l. 29 (1824)

• Oh! wherefore come ye forth in triumph from the north,
  With your hands and your feet and your raiment all red?
  And wherefore doth your rout send forth a joyous shout?
  And whence be the grapes of the wine-press which ye tread?
  • The Battle of Naseby (1824)

• The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion.
  • On the Athenian Orators (August 1824)

• Our academical Pharisees.
  • On Milton (1825)

• Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night;
  Say will it not be then the same,
  Whether we played the black or white,
  Whether we lost or won the game?
  • Sermon in a Churchyard, st. 8 (1825)

• Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.
  • On Machiavelli (1827)

• Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.
  • On Machiavelli (1827)

• The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
  • On Hallam's Constitutional History (1828)

• Intoxicated with animosity.
  • On Hallam's Constitutional History

• We have classical associations and great names of our own which we can confidently oppose to the most splendid of ancient times. Senate has not to our ears a sound so venerable as Parliament. We respect the Great Charter more than the laws of Solon. The Capitol and the Forum impress us with less awe than our own Westminster Hall and Westminster Abbey...The list of warriors and statesmen by whom our constitution was founded or preserved, from De Montfort down to Fox, may well stand a comparison with the Fasti of Rome. The dying thanksgiving of Sydney is as noble as the libation which Thrasea poured to Liberating Jove: and we think with far less pleasure of Cato tearing out his entrails than of Russell saying, as he turned away from his wife, that the bitterness of death was past.
  • 'History', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)

• Our liberty is neither Greek nor Roman; but essentially English. It has a character of its own,—a character which has taken a tinge from the sentiments of the chivalrous ages, and which accords with the peculiarities of our manners and of our insular situation. It has a language, too, of its own, and a language singularly idiomatic, full of meaning to ourselves, scarcely intelligible to strangers.
  • 'History', Edinburgh Review (May 1828)

1830s

• I have not the Chancellor’s encyclopedic mind. He is indeed a kind of semi-Solomon. He half knows everything, from the cedar to the hyssop.
  • Letter to Macvey Napier (17 December 1830)

• Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again. ... It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver taking the mace from the table; a sight to be seen only once, and never to be forgotten. ... [Y]ou might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation. We shook hands, and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby. ... I called a cabriolet, and the first thing the driver asked was, “Is the Bill carried?” “Yes, by one.” “Thank God for it, Sir.” And away I rode to Gray's Inn,—and so ended a scene which will probably never be equalled till the reformed Parliament wants reforming; and that I hope will not be till the days of our grandchildren, till that truly orthodox and apostolical person Dr. Francis Ellis is an archbishop of eighty.
  • On the passage of the Great Reform Act; letter to Ellis (30 March 1831), quoted in George Otto Trevelyan, The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, Volume I (Longmans, 1876), pp. 201–204

• That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
  • On Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1831)

• What a singular destiny has been that of this remarkable man!—To be regarded in his own age as a classic, and in ours as a companion! To receive from his contemporaries that full homage which men of genius have in general received only from posterity; to be more intimately known to posterity than other men are known to their contemporaries!
  • On Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1831)

• The great cause of revolutions is this, that while nations move onward, constitutions stand still.
  • Speech on Parliamentary Reform. (1831)

• Reform, that we may preserve.
  • Debate on the First Reform Bill (2 March 1831)

• Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.
  • Political Georgics (June 29, 1831)

• The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.
  • On Horace Walpole (1833)

• Such night in England ne'er had been, nor ne'er again shall be.
  • The Armada, l. 34 (1833)

• 'It is scarcely possible to calculate the benefits which we might derive from the diffusion of European civilisation among the vast population of the East. It would be, on the most selfish view of the case, far better for us that the people of India were well governed and independent of us, than ill governed and subject to us; that they were ruled by their own kings, but wearing our broadcloth, and working with our cutlery, than that they were performing their salams to English collectors and English magistrates, but were too ignorant to value, or too poor to buy, English manufactures. To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages. That would, indeed, be a doting wisdom, which, in order that India might remain a dependency, would make it an useless and costly dependency, which would keep a hundred millions of men from being our customers in order that they might continue to be our slaves.'"
  • "From his Speech in Parliament on the Government of India Bill, 10 July 1833. Quoted from Koenraad Elst, The Argumentative Hindu (2012) Chapter 3

• It may be that the public mind of India may expand under our system till it has outgrown that system; that by good government we may educate our subjects into a capacity for better government, that, having become instructed in European knowledge, they may, in some future age, demand European institutions. Whether such a day will ever come I know not. But never will I attempt to avert or to retard it. Whenever it comes, it will be the proudest day in English history.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (10 July 1833)

• No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as matter of policy; but many profess themselves pure Deists, and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolator among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytise; without the smallest interference with religious liberty; merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the prospect.'"
  • Letter written to his father in 1836. Quoted in Indian Church History Review, December 1973, p. 187. Partially quoted in Goel, S. R. (2016). History of Hindu-Christian encounters, AD 304 to 1996. Chapter 13. ISBN 9788185990354 . Quoted from Koenraad Elst, The Argumentative Hindu (2012) Chapter 3

• To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.
  • On Lord Bacon (1837)

• An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia.
  • On Lord Bacon

• Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.
  • On Sir William Temple (1838)

• To the Whigs of the seventeenth century we owe it that we have a House of Commons. To the Whigs of the nineteenth century we owe it that the House of Commons has been purified. The abolition of the slave-trade, the abolition of colonial slavery, the extension of popular education, the mitigation of the rigour of the penal code, all, all were effected by that party; and of that party, I repeat, I am a member. I look with pride on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom...While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I at least be found.
  • Speech to the electors at Edinburgh (May 1839)

1840s

• Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa.
  • On Lord Clive (1840)

• She [the Roman Catholic Church] may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.
  • On Ranke's History of the Popes (1840)

• She [the Catholic Church] thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.
  • On Ranke's History of the Popes (1840)

• The Chief Justice was rich, quiet, and infamous.
  • On Warren Hastings (1841)

• In that temple of silence and reconciliation where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the great Abbey which has during many ages afforded a quiet resting-place to those whose minds and bodies have been shattered by the contentions of the Great Hall.
  • On Warren Hastings (1841)

• Thus, then, stands the case. It is good, that authors should be remunerated; and the least exceptionable way of remunerating them is by a monopoly. Yet monopoly is an evil. For the sake of the good we must submit to the evil; but the evil ought not to last a day longer than is necessary for the purpose of securing the good.
  • Speech on the Copyright Bill (5 February 1841)

• I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.
  • Letter to Macvey Napier (5 November 1841)

• In order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America.
  • On Fredrick the Great (1842)

• We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
  • On Fredrick the Great (1842)

• I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading.
  • Letter to his Niece (15 September 1842)

• The highest proof of virtue is to possess boundless power without abusing it.
  • Review of Aiken’s Life of Addison (1843)

• I would not give up the keys to the granary, because I know that, by doing so, I should turn scarcity into a famine.
  • Sullivan, p. 266 (1843)

• He [Richard Steele] was a rake among scholars, and a scholar among rakes.
  • Review of Aiken’s Life of Addison

• A man who has never looked on Niagra has but a faint idea of a cataract; and he who has not read Barère's Memoirs may be said not to know what it is to lie.
  • On Mémoires de Bertrand Barère (1844)

• There you [Sir Robert Peel] sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years.
  • Speech in the House of Commons (14 April 1845)

• Forget all feuds, and shed one English tear
  O'er English dust. A broken heart lies here.
  • Epitaph on a Jacobite (1845)

• The sweeter sound of woman’s praise.
  • Lines written in August, 1847

1850s

• It is odd that the last twenty-five years which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science—the greatest victories ever achieved by mind over matter—should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900.
  • Diary entry (9 March 1850)

• Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.
  • Letter to H.S. Randall, author of a Life of Thomas Jefferson (23 May 1857)

• These be the great Twin Brethren
  To whom the Dorians pray.
  • The Battle of Lake Regillus; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Essay on Mitford's History of Greece (1824)

• That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

• Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

• Wherever literature consoles sorrow or assuages pain; wherever it brings gladness to eyes which fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the long sleep,—there is exhibited in its noblest form the immortal influence of Athens.

On Milton (1825)

• We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

• Nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand.

• The dust and silence of the upper shelf.

• As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

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

• There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom.

• Many politicians of our time 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. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed have to wait forever.
  • Critical and Historical Essays: Volume II (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1907), p. 180

On John Dryden (1828)

• The English Bible,—a book which if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

• His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.

• A man possessed of splendid talents, which he often abused, and of a sound judgment, the admonitions of which he often neglected; a man who succeeded only in an inferior department of his art, but who in that department succeeded pre-eminently.

• It seems that the creative faculty and the critical faculty cannot exist together in their highest perfection.

Southey's Colloquies on Society (1830)

Full text online

• Men are never so likely to settle a question rightly as when they discuss it freely.

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

• Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from the birth as a paternal, or, in other words, a meddling government, a government which tells them what to read, and say, and eat, and drink and wear.

• 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.

On Moore’s Life of Lord Byron (1830)

• He had a head which statuaries loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the streets mimicked.

• We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

• From the poetry of Lord Byron they drew a system of ethics compounded of misanthropy and voluptuousness,—a system in which the two great commandments were to hate your neighbour and to love your neighbour’s wife.

Minute on Indian Education (1835)

• In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them, that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect. 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.
  • Minute on Education (1835)

• "I am quite ready to take the Oriental learning at the valuation of the Orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education. [...] It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say, that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England."
  • Minute on Indian Education (2 February 1835) in the Grat Indian Education debate, Lynn Zastoupil and Martin Moir, London: Curzon, 1999 p. 165

Lays of Ancient Rome (1842)

Full text online at Project Gutenberg

Lars Porsena of Closium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

• Lars Porsena of Closium
  By the Nine Gods he swore
  That the great house of Tarquin
  Should suffer wrong no more.
  By the Nine Gods he swore it,
  And named a trysting day,
  And bade his messengers ride forth,
  East and west and south and north,
  To summon his array.
  • Horatius, st. 1

• Then out spake brave Horatius,
  The Captain of the Gate:
  "To every man upon this earth
  Death cometh soon or late.
  And how can man die better
  Than facing fearful odds,
  For the ashes of his fathers,
  And the temples of his gods,

  And for the tender mother
  Who dandled him to rest,
  And for the wife who nurses
  His baby at her breast,
  And for the holy maidens
  Who feed the eternal flame,
  To save them from false Sextus
  That wrought the deed of shame?"

  • Horatius, st. 26 & 27; this quote is often truncated to read:

To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

• Then none was for a party,
  Then all were for the state;
  Then the rich man helped the poor,
  And the poor man loved the great;
  Then lands were fairly portioned,
  Then spoils were fairly sold;
  The Romans were like brothers
  In the brave days of old.

  Now Roman is to Roman
  More hateful than a foe;
  And the Tribunes beard the high
  and the fathers grind the low;
  As we wax hot in faction,
  In battle we wax cold;
  And men fight not as they fought
  In the brave days of old.

  • Horatius, st. 32 & 33

• Was none who would be foremost
  To lead such dire attack;
  But those behind cried, "Forward!"
  And those before cried, "Back!"
  • Horatius, st. 50

• "Oh, Tiber! Father Tiber!
  To whom the Romans pray,
  A Roman's life, a Roman's arms,
  Take thou in charge this day!"
  So he spake, and speaking sheathed
  The good sword by his side,
  And with his harness on his back,
  Plunged headlong in the tide.
  • Horatius, st. 59

• No sound of joy or sorrow
  Was heard from either bank;
  But friends and foes in dumb surprise,
  With parted lips and straining eyes,
  Stood gazing where he sank;
  And when above the surges,
  They saw his crest appear,
  All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry,
  And even the ranks of Tuscany
  Could scarce forbear to cheer.
  • Horatius, st. 60

• When the goodman mends his armor,
  And trims his helmet's plume;
  When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
  Goes flashing through the loom;
  With weeping and with laughter
  Still is the story told,
  How well Horatius kept the bridge
  In the brave days of old.
  • Horatius, st. 70

History of England (1849–1861)

• Those who compare the age in which their lot has fallen with a golden age which exists only in imagination, may talk of degeneracy and decay; but no man who is correctly informed as to the past, will be disposed to take a morose or desponding view of the present.
  • Vol. I, ch. 1

• 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.
  • Vol. I, ch. 1

• There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles II. But the seamen were not gentlemen, and the gentlemen were not seamen.
  • Vol. I, ch. 2

• The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
  • Vol. I, ch. 3

• The Chief Justice was all himself. His spirits rose higher and higher as the work went on. He laughed, shouted, joked, and swore in such a way that many thought him drunk from morning to night. But in him it was not easy to distinguish the madness produced by evil passions from the madness produced by brandy. A prisoner affirmed that the witnesses who appeared against him were not entitled to credit. One of them, he said, was a Papist, and another a prostitute. "Thou impudent rebel," exclaimed the Judge, "to reflect on the King's evidence! I see thee, villain, I see thee already with the halter round thy neck." Another produced testimony that he was a good Protestant. "Protestant!" said Jeffreys; "you mean Presbyterian. I'll hold you a wager of it. I can smell a Presbyterian forty miles." One wretched man moved the pity even of bitter Tories. "My Lord," they said, "this poor creature is on the parish." "Do not trouble yourselves," said the Judge, "I will ease the parish of the burden."
  • Vol. I, ch. 5
  • On Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assizes

• Now, if ever, we ought to be able to appreciate the whole importance of the stand which was made by our forefathers against the House of Stuart. All around us the world is convulsed by the agonies of great nations. Governments which lately seemed likely to stand during ages have been on a sudden shaken and overthrown. ... Meanwhile in our island the regular course of government has never been for a day interrupted. The few bad men who longed for license and plunder have not had the courage to confront for one moment the strength of a loyal nation, rallied in firm array round a parental throne. And, if it be asked what has made us to differ from others, the answer is that we never lost what others are wildly and blindly seeking to regain. It is because we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy. For the authority of law, for the security of property, for the peace of our streets, for the happiness of our houses, our gratitude is due, under Him who raises and pulls down nations at his pleasure, to the Long Parliament, to the Convention, and to William of Orange.
  • Vol. II, ch. 10

• The ambassador [of Russia] and the grandees who accompanied him were so gorgeous that all London crowded to stare at them, and so filthy that nobody dared to touch them. They came to the court balls dropping pearls and vermin.
  • Vol. V, ch. 23