Thomas Babington Macaulay

Nothing is so galling to a people not broken in from birth, as a government which tells them what to read and say and eat and drink and wear

As civilisation advances, poetry almost necessarily declines.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

The business of everybody is the business of nobody.

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

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