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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
Authority
Legitimacy
Political
Legitimate
Government
Effectively
Historian
Limitation
Limited
Essential
Essentials

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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
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A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.
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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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Remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin.
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The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation--religion, education, and the distribution of wealth.
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The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded.
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Progress, the religion of those who have none.
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Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.
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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
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History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
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History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
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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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Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.
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Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
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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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The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
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The fate of every democracy, of every government based on the sovereignty of the people, depends on the choices it makes between these opposite principles, absolute power on the one hand, and on the other the restraints of legality and the authority of tradition.
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To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.
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History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
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A public man has no right to let his actions be determined by particular interests. He does the same thing as a judge who accepts a bribe. Like a judge he must consider what is right, not what is advantageous to a party or class.
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