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Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
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Straight

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History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys.
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Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.
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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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Progress, the religion of those who have none.
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Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences and injurious to society and morality.
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It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.
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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.
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A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.
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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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Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.
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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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The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.
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Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
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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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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.
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History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.
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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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Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.
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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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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