Macaulay's Writings : English Par Excellence

I am die hard fan of Lord Macaulay writings.  The sheer intensity of his vocabulary mesmerized me. I would like to recall a few of his outstanding statements that made me scamper towards a dictionary to decode the cryptic message.

• An acre of Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. The smallest actual good is better than the most magnificent promises of impossibilities.
•  With the dead there is no rivalry. In the dead there is no change. Plato is never sullen. Cervantes is never petulant. Demosthenes never comes unseasonably. Dante never stays too long. No difference of political opinion can alienate Cicero. No heresy can excite the horror of Bossuet.
•  That wonderful book, while it obtains admiration from the most fastidious critics, is loved by those who are too simple to admire it.
•  We hardly know an instance of the strength and weakness of human nature so striking and so grotesque as the character of this haughty, vigilant, resolute, sagacious blue-stocking, half Mithridates and half Trissotin, bearing up against a world in arms, with an ounce of poison in one pocket and a quire of bad verses in the other.
•  His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar.
•  Our judgment ripens; our imagination decays. We cannot at once enjoy the flowers of the Spring of life and the fruits of its Autumn.
•  I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history.
•  Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized people is poetical.
•  The object of oratory alone in not truth, but persuasion.
•  Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.