Lord Acton Quotes

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.

Socialism means slavery.

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

Progress, the religion of those who have none.

Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.

Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.

Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.

Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding.

A public man has no right to let his actions be determined by particular interests. He does the same thing as a judge who accepts a bribe. Like a judge he must consider what is right, not what is advantageous to a party or class.

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith.

I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realization the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.

There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.

The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.

Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of the universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God.

Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.

We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.

The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers.

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime ...

The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realization of a political ideal; it is the discharge of a moral obligation.

Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.

It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State
ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios
burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man ... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.

Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.

Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power
power sufficient to interfere with property.

The true guide of our conduct is no outward authority, but the voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our souls, who knows all our thoughts, to whom are owing all the truth we know, and all the good we do; for vice is voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the heavenly spirit within.

Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States.

Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.

Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

Government by idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, a future danger.

Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.

Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power.

The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.

A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.

Every class is unfit to govern.

In England Parliament is above the law. In America the law is above Congress.

There are many things the government cant do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people. It cannot convert the people.

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.

Towns were the nursery of freedom.

Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.

The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided; the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed.

The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.

Official truth is not actual truth.

A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

Ink was not invented to express our real feelings.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.

A government does not desire its powers to be strictly defined, but the subjects require the line to be drawn with increasing precision.

It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men's minds.

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

The light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority.

There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.

A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

The idea that the object of constitutions is not to confirm the predominance of any interest, but to prevent it; to preserve with equal care the independence of labour and the security of property; to make the rich safe against envy, and the poor against oppression, marks the highest level attained by the statesmanship of Greece.

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.

Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians.

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience
a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

False principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations.

Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience.

The mills of God grind slowly.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

A history that should pursue all the subtle threads from end to end might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and conciliation.