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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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Lord Acton
Political
Legitimate
Government
Effectively
Historian
Limitation
Limited
Essential
Essentials
Authority
Legitimacy

More quotes by Lord Acton

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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.
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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
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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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I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they do no wrong. If there is any presumption, it is the other way against holders of power...power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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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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Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime.
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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
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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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Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.
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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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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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Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.
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A government does not desire its powers to be strictly defined, but the subjects require the line to be drawn with increasing precision.
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.
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Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
Lord Acton
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History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
Lord Acton
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It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
Lord Acton
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By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.
Lord Acton
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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
Lord Acton
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Remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin.
Lord Acton