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The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.

Lord Acton

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Lord Acton
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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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The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
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Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.
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Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.
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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 few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed.
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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.
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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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Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers.
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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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When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth.
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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.
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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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The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.
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A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.
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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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Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good public administration that it is required, but for the security in the pursuit of the highest objects of civil society, and of private life.
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