Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

The first democratic revolution was England in the 1640s.

The history of England is emphatically the history of progress.

The freedoms won by Americans in 1776 were lost in the revolution of 1913.

Revolutions are celebrated when they are no longer dangerous.

The Stuart sovereigns of England steadily attempted to strengthen their power, and the resistance to that effort caused an immense growth of Parliamentary influence.

Revolutions are the periods of history when individuals count most.

A revolution in itself is not a blessing. The revolution accomplished by the French people is, indeed, a wonderful event - the most striking, in my opinion, in history; but it may lead to events which will make it a mighty evil.

From William of Orange to William Pitt the younger there was but one man without whom English history must have taken a different turn, and that was William Pitt the elder.

The tea has been thrown overboard. The revolution of 1860 has been initiated.

In Prussia it is only kings who make revolutions.

The choice is De Gaulle or anarchy.

The country had been so essentially non-constitutional and feudal that it was difficult to sit down on the debris of its history and prepare for it off-hand a constitution.

Be not deceived. Revolutions do not go backward.

Revolutions are always the deepest memories of a people

If revolution insists upon overturning established order, let other peoples make the tragic experiment. There is no place for it in America.

The Civil War still remains the crossroads of our being.

Revolution is usually a bloody affair. Our Revolution of 1911 did not shed much blood because our people are a peace-loving people. This peace-loving quality is the greatest virtue of the Chinese.

I was 6 when communism was finished.

The French Revolution was a kind of 21st-century moment in the heart of the 18th century - and Alex Dumas, outstanding though he was, could never have risen the way he did if not for that. The French Revolution was the American Revolution on steroids.

Vernon Bogdanor's account The Monarchy and the Constitution is written as much in the shadow of Edmund Burke as it is of Walter Bagehot. He stresses the organic development of the British constitution, prefers evolution to revolution, and thinks stability is better than strife.

In 1688 England contracted to the Netherlands the highest debt that one nation can owe to another. Herself not knowing how to recover her liberties, they were restored by men of the United Provinces.

Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our revolution. They existed before.

The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age. Whoever takes offence at this combination, and whoever does not consider a revolution important unless it is blatant and palpable, has not yet risen to the lofty and broad vantage point of the history of mankind.

It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar.

Scholars have been arguing for a long time whether the Soviet Union could have been turned into some kind of social democracy. I doubt it myself. I think what Gorbachev didn't quite understand, until it was too late, is that his efforts at change unleashed new, certrifical forces he hadn't counted on. He opened the door a crack and a huge wind blew it open.