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

Lord Acton

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More quotes by Lord Acton

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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 common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
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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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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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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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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.
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Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
Lord Acton
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
Lord Acton
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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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Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.
Lord Acton
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The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion.
Lord Acton
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History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
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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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.
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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A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
Lord Acton
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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
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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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.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton