Rose Macaulay's Quotes

It is a common delusion that you make things better by talking about them.

Each wrong act brings with it its own anesthetic, dulling the conscience and blinding it against further light, and sometimes for years.

It was a book to kill time for those who like it better dead.

Love's a disease. But curable.

You should always believe what you read in the newspapers, for that makes them more interesting.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

The knowledge of the theory of logic has no tendency whatever to make men good reasoners.

The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.

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

There were gentlemen and there were seamen in the navy of Charles the Second. But the seamen were not gentlemen; and the gentlemen were not seamen.

To sum up the whole, we should say that the aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god.

Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!

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

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

Your Constitution is all sail and no anchor.

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors.

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.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

And how can man die better than facing fearful odds, for the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his Gods?

I would rather be poor in a cottage full of books than a king without the desire to read.

Many politicians are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim.

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

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.