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A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.
Lord Acton
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Lord Acton
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More quotes by Lord Acton
The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation--religion, education, and the distribution of wealth.
Lord Acton
The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
Lord Acton
We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
Lord Acton
The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.
Lord Acton
The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class. It is not the realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation.
Lord Acton
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
Lord Acton
Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.
Lord Acton
Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
Lord Acton
The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
The mills of God grind slowly.
Lord Acton
It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
Lord Acton
I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
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
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Lord Acton
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.
Lord Acton
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
Lord Acton
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Lord Acton