Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals, with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.
Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Machiavelli” (March 1827), a review of Oeuvres completes de MACHIAVEL (J. V. Perier: 1825), in Critical and Historical Essays: Contributed to the Edinburgh Review (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans: 1843).
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Thomas Babington Macaulay
