Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

The future of the West is not a limitless tending upwards and onwards for all time towards our presents ideals, but a single phenomenon of history, strictly limited and defined as to form and duration, which covers a few centuries

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you'll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it's getting worse.

The current generation now sees everything clearly, it marvels at the errors, it laughs at the folly of its ancestors, not seeing that this chronicle is all overscored by divine fire, that every letter of it cries out, that from everywhere the piercing finger is pointed at it, at this current generation; but the current generation laughs and presumptuously, proudly begins a series of new errors, at which their descendants will also laugh afterwards.

Nothing before you counts,” he said. “And I can’t even imagine an after.

It's not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they're living better.

Remember always, that man is a creature whose reason is often darkened with error.

Hinduism is not just a faith. It is the union of reason and intuition that can not be defined but is only to be experienced. Evil and error are not ultimate. There is no Hell, for that means there is a place where God is not, and there are sins which exceed his love.

The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.

Sure, good things can go badly wrong. Nevertheless, there's always another day.

It's being here now that's important. There's no past and there's no future. Time is a very misleading thing. All there is ever, is the now. We can gain experience from the past, but we can't relive it; and we can hope for the future, but we don't know if there is one.

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. Society acquires new arts, and loses old instincts.

The future will be what it will, and fretting about it will only make your fears more likely to come true.

We're involved in a society which is undergoing some really weird changes now.

Maybe next time, but probably not.

Sociology was born of the modern ardor to improve society.

It has been said that the reason we establish relationships is to assure ourselves of a witness to our lives.

... unless you made your life a turning point, there was no reason for existing.

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

The world is always childish, and with each new gewgaw of a revolution or new constitution that it finds, thinks it shall never cry any more.

To hope is to contradict the future.

If there's anything I could undo - usually when I want to undo things its like right on the moment because I look to the stuff that I go through in my life and something always comes out for a reason so I'm doing that. But, its always that when you say something that's just so asinine and so stupid, you're like, ahh, if I could just, please, have an undo button just to not say that.

It is the impulse of our century, with its nearly religious belief in magnitude, to fling an institution into every void.

Despair is the greatest of our errors.

That was all he said, except for "Aaaeerrgghhh." Which is not really a word. But the reason that he screamed "Aaaeerrgghhh" was that Franco had bitten him savegly on the wrist.

Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless.