Thomas Babington Macaulay Quotes

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

The history of the world shows that peoples and societies do not have to pass through a fixed series of stages in the course of development.

Ideas appropriate to a past social order have a strange power of influencing thought and action within a later institutional framework.

Do you think we choose the times into which we are born? Or do we fit the times we are born into?

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Ideology demands it. Society exacts it.

Every epoch has its character determined by the way its population reacts to the material events which they encounter.

People resemble still more the time in which they live, than they resemble their fathers.

Any man that resists the present tides that run in the world, will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem he has been separated from his human kind forever.

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

The rich experience of history teaches that up to now not a single class has voluntarily made way for another class.

Remove from the history of the past all those actions which have either sprung directly from the religious nature of man, or been modified by it, and you have the history of another world and of another race.

In the 21st century, culture is power.

I do like the idea of the novel of repressed college students being a contemporary novel of courtship! I guess what I would say to that is, we tend to think of historical periods and historical mores as ending a lot more concretely than they do. Like, in an Austen novel, there are lots of reasons - cultural, moral, religious - why the characters don't have sex during courtship. Maybe, even though those reasons have kind of expired, historically, they're still around in some sense.

Every new fad or fashion at once has its denouncers from the pulpit, platform, professor's chair.

In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach.

In this Revolution, no plans have been written for retreat. Those who will not get into step will find that the parade has passed them by.

Eternal truth needs a human language that alters with the spirit of the times.

She was old too, when she went to school they didn't have history.

There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics.

When people laugh at your institutions and convince you that you have to adopt theirs - adopt their dress, adopt their taste in food - you are a prisoner to those people.

Those who try to lead the people can only do so by following the mob. It is through the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the gods must be prepared.

I wonder whether there has been too much emphasis on teaching women to conform, to fit into the system. Certainly that suits conservative organizations in conservative times. But now ... innovation and creativity are necessary.

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

It is the age that forms the man, not the man that forms the age.