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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.

Lord Acton

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We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
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The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
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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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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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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
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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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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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Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.
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The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.
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If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.
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The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future.
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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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History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
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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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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
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