The mills of God grind slowly.
LORD ACTONThough 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.
More Lord Acton Quotes
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History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
LORD ACTON -
I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.
LORD ACTON -
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous.
LORD ACTON -
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.
LORD ACTON -
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
LORD ACTON -
The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
LORD ACTON -
No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.
LORD ACTON -
Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.
LORD ACTON -
The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers.
LORD ACTON -
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
LORD ACTON -
A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
LORD ACTON -
Far from being the product of a democratic revolution and of an opposition to English institutions, the constitution of the United States was the result of a powerful reaction against democracy, and in favor of the traditions of the mother country.
LORD ACTON -
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
LORD ACTON -
Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
LORD ACTON -
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.
LORD ACTON