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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.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
Surest
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More quotes by Lord Acton

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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
Lord Acton
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The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation--religion, education, and the distribution of wealth.
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The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
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By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
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Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.
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The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.
Lord Acton
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Official truth is not actual truth.
Lord Acton
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The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.
Lord Acton
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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.
Lord Acton
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There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton
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History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton
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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
Lord Acton
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Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton
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Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
Lord Acton
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Socialism means slavery.
Lord Acton
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A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton