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The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.

Lord Acton

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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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History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys.
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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.
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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.
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Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
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Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
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Official truth is not actual truth.
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Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.
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If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.
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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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Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime.
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Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.
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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 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.
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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
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Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
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Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.
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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.
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