Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas B. Macaulay

Macaulay is warning that factional hatred doesn not just poison relationships; it hollows out the very idea of a shared state. The line is built like a diagnosis. "Violent dislike between groups" is not ordinary disagreement, but identity-level enmity, the kind that makes compromise feel like betrayal. Once politics becomes a moral blood sport, "welfare" and "honor" stop being common goods and start reading like propaganda slogans waved by the other side.

The subtext is coldly pragmatic: people who hate each other intensely will eventually treat the state as a tool, not a trust. If your opponents win, you would rather see the country fail than see them credited with success. That is what Macaulay means by "indifference" - not apathy, but a grim willingness to let institutions burn if it hurts the right people. The word "always" carries his historian's arrogance and his historian's evidence: he's claiming a pattern across eras, a recurring mechanism in republics and empires alike.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of the French Revolution and amid Britain's own reform fights, Macaulay had seen how ideological camps could turn civic life into a loyalty test. As a Whig historian, he believed in progress through institutions and constitutional norms; this sentence is the fear underneath that faith. When group hatred becomes the primary engine, the state's legitimacy is no longer inherited or argued for - it's merely captured, defended, or sabotaged.