"Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action." ― Thomas B. Macaulay Topic(s): Poetry More From Thomas B. Macaulay "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." "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." "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." More In Poetry "In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry."― Danielle Steel "But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry."― Chinua Achebe "France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic."― Charles Baudelaire