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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.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
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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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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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Remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin.
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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 reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
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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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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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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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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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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
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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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Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.
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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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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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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error.
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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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The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
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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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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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton