Wit & Attitude Quote by Thomas B. Macaulay

Macaulay lands the blow with a historian's favorite weapon: scale. "Few", "many", "a single" compress centuries of moral instruction into a bleak audit report. The line is built like a courtroom argument - the wise sayings are "many", their measurable effect is almost nil. In one stroke he demotes the aphorism from wisdom to decoration, something societies collect the way they collect monuments: to signal virtue more than to practice it.

The subtext is less anti-wisdom than anti-complacency. Macaulay isn't denying that people can learn; he's mocking the idea that insight, once uttered, automatically travels into behavior. The word "prevented" matters: it frames folly as something that ought to be stoppable if counsel were truly potent. Yet human action, in his view, is driven by appetite, fear, status, and habit - forces sturdier than a neatly turned phrase. Aphorisms survive because they flatter us into thinking our failures are intellectual problems, solvable by the right sentence, rather than moral and institutional ones.

As a Victorian historian steeped in progress talk, Macaulay is also poking at his era's faith in improvement through education and public moralizing. The nineteenth century loved maxims: in sermons, parliamentary speeches, and self-help manuals. His skepticism reads like a corrective to a culture that confused eloquence with leverage. Wise apothegms don't fail because they're wrong; they fail because the people who quote them are often the ones least inclined to pay their price.