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Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power -- power sufficient to interfere with property.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
Power
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Strongest
Socialism
Sufficient
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Easily
Accepts
Property
Despotism
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Interfere

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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
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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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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.
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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
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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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When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth.
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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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Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
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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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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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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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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.
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The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
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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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A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
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Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.
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The mills of God grind slowly.
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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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The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
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