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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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Lord Acton
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More quotes by Lord Acton

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A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.
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Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
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Progress, the religion of those who have none.
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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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Socialism means slavery.
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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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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.
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.
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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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The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
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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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous.
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Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.
Lord Acton
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Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Lord Acton
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It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
Lord Acton
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In every age its (liberty's) progress has been beset by its natural enemies, by ignorance and superstition, by lust of conquest and by love of ease, by the strong man's craving for power, and the poor man's craving for food
Lord Acton
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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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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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From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
Lord Acton
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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.
Lord Acton