Lord Acton Quotes & Sayings

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. — Lord Acton

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this. — Lord Acton

It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others. — Lord Acton

Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other. — Lord Acton

To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice. — Lord Acton

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future. — Lord Acton

Monarchy hardens into despotism. Aristocracy contracts into oligarchy. Democracy expands into the supremacy of numbers. — 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 realization of a political ideal; it is the discharge of a moral obligation. — Lord Acton

Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law. — Lord Acton

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime ... — Lord Acton

The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust. — Lord Acton

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

The possession of unlimited power corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding. — 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

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. — Lord Acton

Liberty has not only enemies which it conquers, but perfidious friends, who rob the fruits of its victories: Absolute democracy, socialism. — Lord Acton

Machiavelli's teaching would hardly have stood the test of Parliamentary government, for public discussion demands at least the profession of good faith. — Lord Acton

Every class is unfit to govern. — Lord Acton

To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history. — Lord Acton

Government by idea tends to take in everything, to make the whole of society obedient to the idea. Spaces not so governed are unconquered, beyond the border, unconverted, a future danger. — Lord Acton

Many things are better for silence than for speech: others are better for speech than for stationery. — 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

Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice. — Lord Acton

A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom — Lord Acton

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away. — Lord Acton

Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country. — Lord Acton

The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future. — 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

A history that should pursue all the subtle threads from end to end might be eminently valuable, but not as a tribute to peace and conciliation. — Lord Acton

The few have not strength to achieve great changes unaided; the many have not wisdom to be moved by truth unmixed. — Lord Acton

Towns were the nursery of freedom. — Lord Acton

Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force. — Lord Acton

The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely acquired the rudiments of religious instruction, turned with childlike attachment to men whose minds were stored with the knowledge of Scripture, of Cicero, of St. Augustine; and in the scanty world of their ideas, the Church was felt to be something infinitely vaster, stronger, holier than their newly founded States. — Lord Acton

I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. — Lord Acton

The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers. — Lord Acton

No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence. — Lord Acton

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. — Lord Acton

The mills of God grind slowly. — Lord Acton

Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes. — Lord Acton

A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar. — Lord Acton

The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy. — Lord Acton

There are many things the government cant do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of others. It cannot feed the people. It cannot enrich the people. It cannot teach the people. It cannot convert the people. — Lord Acton

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

It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness. — Lord Acton

Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character. — Lord Acton

Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future. — Lord Acton

Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realization the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition. — Lord Acton

The true natural check on absolute democracy is the federal system, which limits the central government by the powers reserved, and the state governments by the powers they have ceded. — Lord Acton

Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power. — 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 danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern. — Lord Acton

Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned,-the habit of making history into the proof of their theories. — Lord Acton

False principles, which correspond with the bad as well as with the just aspirations of mankind, are a normal and necessary element in the social life of nations. — Lord Acton

Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things. — Lord Acton

The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities. — Lord Acton

Official truth is not actual truth. — Lord Acton

There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. — Lord Acton

Remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin. — Lord Acton

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. — Lord Acton

The principle of the Inquisition was murderous ... The popes were not only murderers in the great style, but they also made murder a legal basis of the Christian Church and a condition of salvation. — Lord Acton

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. — Lord Acton

Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity. Something was wanted, beyond all the gifts of reflection and experience
a faculty of self government and self control, developed like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth. — Lord Acton

Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power
power sufficient to interfere with property. — Lord Acton

Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote the delicacy, integrity, and authority of Conscience. — Lord Acton

It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State
ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios
burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man ... and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control. — Lord Acton

Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality. — 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

I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money. — Lord Acton

Character is tested by true sentiments more than by conduct. A man is seldom better than his word. — Lord Acton

I saw in States' rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy ... Therefore I deemed that you were fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization, and I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo. — Lord Acton

The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom. — Lord Acton

If some great catastrophe is not announced every morning, we feel a certain void. Nothing in the paper today, we sigh. — Lord Acton

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

The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of science was the age of Pericles, and the endeavour to substitute certain truth for the prescriptions of impaired authorities, which was then beginning to absorb the energies of the Greek intellect, is the grandest movement in the profane annals of mankind, for to it we owe, even after the immeasurable progress accomplished by Christianity, much of our philosophy and far the better part of the political knowledge we possess. — Lord Acton

A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark. — Lord Acton

Fanaticism displays itself in the masses; but the masses were rarely fanaticised; and the crimes ascribed to it were commonly due to the calculations of dispassionate politicians. — Lord Acton

There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. — Lord Acton

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong. — Lord Acton

The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge. — Lord Acton

For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But when modern absolutism arose, it laid claim to everything on behalf of the sovereign power ... When the revolutionary theory of government began to prevail, and Church and State found that they were educating for opposite ends and in a contradictory spirit, it became necessary to remove children entirely from the influence of religion. — Lord Acton

A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism. — Lord Acton

The true guide of our conduct is no outward authority, but the voice of God, who comes down to dwell in our souls, who knows all our thoughts, to whom are owing all the truth we know, and all the good we do; for vice is voluntary, and virtue comes from the grace of the heavenly spirit within. — Lord Acton

Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty. — Lord Acton

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches. — Lord Acton

The man who prefers his country before any other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the state. They both deny that right is superior to authority. — Lord Acton

Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history. — Lord Acton

The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality. — Lord Acton

It is very easy to speak words of wisdom from a comfortable distance, when one sees no reality, no details, none of the effect on men's minds. — Lord Acton

Ink was not invented to express our real feelings. — Lord Acton

Self-preservation and self-denial: the basis of all political economy. — Lord Acton

Progress, the religion of those who have none. — Lord Acton

There are two things which cannot be attacked in front: ignorance and narrow-mindedness. They can only be shaken by the simple development of the contrary qualities. They will not bear discussion. — Lord Acton

There is not a soul who does not have to beg alms of another, either a smile, a handshake, or a fond eye. — Lord Acton

Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth. — Lord Acton

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions. — Lord Acton

Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited. — Lord Acton

There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success. — Lord Acton

Socialism means slavery. — Lord Acton

Before God, there is neither Greek nor barbarian, neither rich nor poor, and the slave is as good as his master, for by birth all men are free; they are citizens of the universal commonwealth which embraces all the world, brethren of one family, and children of God. — Lord Acton

Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge. — Lord Acton