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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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More quotes by 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
Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.
Lord Acton
The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.
Lord Acton
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
Lord Acton
We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
Lord Acton
Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
Lord Acton
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
The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed.
Lord Acton
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Lord Acton
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
Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes absolute power of the majority.
Lord Acton
Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
Lord Acton
The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.
Lord Acton
If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh.
Lord Acton
The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
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