Frasi di Thomas Macaulay

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“La camera dei comuni fedeli al proprio sistema, rimane in una saggia ed eccellente inattività.”

“Una conoscenza diffusa si rende immortale da sola.”

“È possibile essere al di sotto dell'adulazione, oltre che al di sopra.”

“Esiste solo una cura nei confronti dei mali che una nuova libertà acquisita produce, ed è la libertà stessa.”

“Gli affari di tutti non sono gli affari di nessuno.”

“La civilizzazione avanza e la poesia declina.”

“La vostra Costituzione è tutta vela e niente ancora.”

“Riesce a leggere la storia correttamente soltanto colui che, osservando con quale potenza le circostanze influenzino i sentimenti e le opinioni degli uomini, quanto spesso le virtù si trasformino in vizi e i paradossi in assiomi, impari a distinguere ciò che dell'umana natura è accidentale e transitorio da ciò che è essenziale e immutabile.”

“[…] l'esercito britannico, sotto Pitt, era stato lo zimbello d'Europa. Non poteva vantarsi di una sola azione brillante. Non s'era mai mostrato sul continente che per esservi battuto, cacciato, costretto a rimbarcare, o obbligato a capitolare. Impadronirsi di qualche isola da zucchero nelle Indie occidentali, disperdere qualche tumulto di contadini irlandesi seminudi, queste le più splendide vittorie delle truppe inglesi sotto gli auspici di Pitt.”

“La Storia, si è detto, è la filosofia spiegata con esempi.”

“Ad ogni uomo su questa terra
La morte arriva presto o tardi
E Como un uomo può morire meglio
Che affrontare spaventose probabilità
Per le ceneri dei suoi padri
E i templi di suoi dei”

“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.”

“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.”

“Nine-tenths the calamities of the human race are due to the union of high intelligence with low desires.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“As civilization advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.”

“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.”

“Every schoolboy knows who imprisoned Montezuma, and who strangled Atahualpa.”

“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.”

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

“Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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!”

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

“Press where ye see my white plume shine, amidst the ranks of war,
And be your oriflamme today the helmet of Navarre.”

“We are free, we are civilised, to little purpose, if we grudge to any portion of the human race an equal measure of freedom and civilisation.”

“The dust and silence of the upper shelf.”

“"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.”

“Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons.”

“The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.”

“These be the great Twin Brethren
To whom the Dorians pray.”

“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.”