Lord Acton
Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.Collection: Exercise
Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.Collection: Justice
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.Collection: Inspirational
Official truth is not actual truth.Collection: Truth Is
Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.Collection: Liberty
Guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testingCollection: Trust
Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.Collection: Men
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.Collection: Government
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.Collection: Morality
It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.Collection: People
The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.Collection: Freedom
There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.Collection: Office
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.Collection: God
The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority.Collection: Democracies Have
The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.Collection: Democracy
It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.Collection: Freedom
The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.Collection: People
Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.Collection: Errors
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.Collection: Mean
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.Collection: Country
History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.Collection: History
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.Collection: Fighting
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 realisation of a political ideal: it is the discharge of a moral obligation.Collection: Race
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.Collection: Latin
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.Collection: Religious
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.Collection: Politics
Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.Collection: Lying
Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.Collection: Writing
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.Collection: Past
It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.Collection: Weakness
Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.Collection: Country
I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.Collection: Absolutism
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.Collection: Government
Towns were the nursery of freedom.Collection: Towns
The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.Collection: Rewards
The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.Collection: Government
There is no evidence to support the belief that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ever questioned Americas power. He questioned only the President's John F. Kennedys readiness to use it. Elie Abel, The Missile Crisis (1966) Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.Collection: Power
History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys.Collection: Surveys
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.Collection: Fighting
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.Collection: Might
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men. Imagine a congress of eminent celebrities, such as More, Bacon, Grotius, Pascal, Cromwell, Bossuet, Montesquieu, Jefferson, Napoleon, Pitt, etc. The result would be an Encyclopedia of Error.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Christian
By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes to be his duty against the influences of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.Collection: Believe
Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.Collection: Spiritual
Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.Collection: History
From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.Collection: People
To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.Collection: History
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.Collection: Distance
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities.Collection: Liberty
Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.Collection: Mean