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To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
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More quotes by Lord Acton

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When the last of the Reformers died, religion, instead of emancipating the nations, had become an excuse for the criminal art of despots. Calvin preached, and Bellarmine lectured but Machiavelli reigned.
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Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
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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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Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
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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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A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.
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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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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error.
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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
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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton
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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
Lord Acton
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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
Lord Acton
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Progress, the religion of those who have none.
Lord Acton
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It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
Lord Acton
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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
Lord Acton
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Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.
Lord Acton
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Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.
Lord Acton