No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.
LORD ACTONThe issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.
More Lord Acton Quotes
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Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
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It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.
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History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
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Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.
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I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.
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Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.
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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.
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The principle of the Inquisition was murderous. . . . The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation.
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Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.
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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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Socialism means slavery.
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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.
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The mills of God grind slowly.
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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.
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Though oppression may give rise to violent and repeated outbreaks, like the convulsions of a man in pain, it cannot mature a settled purpose and plan of regeneration, unless a new notion of happiness is joined to the sense of present evil.
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When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion.
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If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
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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.
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Official truth is not actual truth.
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We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
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Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power.
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Ink was not invented to express our real feelings.
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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.
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In every age its (liberty’s) progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man’s craving for power, and the poor man’s craving for food
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Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
LORD ACTON