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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
Contracts
Hardens
Numbers
Oligarchy
Democracy
Expands
Supremacy
Aristocracy
Despotism
Monarchy

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It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
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Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
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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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Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
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The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.
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Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.
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History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.
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Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.
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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, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.
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Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery.
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