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It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
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More quotes by Lord Acton

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The mills of God grind slowly.
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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
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Progress, the religion of those who have none.
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From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
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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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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.
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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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Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. 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.
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The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed.
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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 realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation.
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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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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
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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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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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Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
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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.
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Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
Lord Acton