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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
Spiritual
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Many
Policemen
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Motives
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Straight
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More quotes by Lord Acton

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The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
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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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From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.
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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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History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
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When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth.
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The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
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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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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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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
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The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion.
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History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.
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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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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 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.
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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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A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous, and enslaved.
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There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.
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To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.
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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.
Lord Acton