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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
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Legitimate
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Historian
Limitation
Limited
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Essentials

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Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.
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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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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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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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Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
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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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Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
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Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
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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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Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
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Though oppression may give rise to violent and repeated outbreaks, like the convulsions of a man in pain, it cannot mature a settled purpose and plan of regeneration, unless a new notion of happiness is joined to the sense of present evil.
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Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.
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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
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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.
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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.
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From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
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It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
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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.
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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.
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