Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

Manners easily and rapidly mature into morals.

It is abhorrent to me when a fine intelligence is paired with an unsavory character.

Moral character has now some influence in our elections, but not that place which it deserves. The law of public opinion excludes confirmed sots, and persons judicially convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors against the State; but it ought to render the election of all profane swearers, notorious Sabbath breakers, seducers, slanderers, prodigals and riotous persons, as well as the advocates of dueling, impracticable.

Morality is a social necessity

The general right of the whole decides what is good and what is evil

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

The American sense of decorum is falling apart.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

When modesty has once perished, it will never revive.

There is no man suddenly either excellently good or extremely evil, but grows either as he holds himself up in virtue or lets himself slide to viciousness.

The greatest penalty of evil-doing is to grow into the likeness of a bad man.

Oh, 'tis not my qualities they object to! 'Tis my lack of vice.

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.

If character be irrecoverably lost, then indeed there will be nothing left worth saving.

To claim that theft or adultery or lying are "evil" simply reflects our degraded idea of good-—that it has something to do with respect for property, respectability, and sincerity.

Be thou good thyself, and let people speak evil of thee; it is better than to be wicked, and that they should consider thee as good.

The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached.

A woman once fallen will shrink from no impropriety.

In youth, it is common to measure right and wrong by the opinion of the world, and in age, to act without any measure but interest, and to lose shame without substituting virtue.

Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.

The man that is once hated, both his good and his evil deeds oppress him.

If one is not virtuous he becomes vicious.

Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word sinful is most commonly associated with chocolate.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

To scatter praise or blame without regard to justice is to destroy the distinction of good and evil. Many have no other test of actions than general opinion; and all are so far influenced by a sense of reputation that they are often restrained by fear of reproach, and excited by hope of honour, when other principles have lost their power.