Lord Acton Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

#3. History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

Lord Acton

#4. 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

#5. Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

Lord Acton

#6. A man can be trusted only up to low-water mark.

Lord Acton

#7. Character is tested by true sentiments more than by conduct. A man is seldom better than his word.

Lord Acton

#8. Progress, the religion of those who have none.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#10. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.

Lord Acton

#11. Socialism means slavery.

Lord Acton

#12. The long term versus the short term argument is one used by losers.

Lord Acton

#13. To be able to look back upon one's past life with satisfaction is to live twice.

Lord Acton

#14. Every class is unfit to govern.

Lord Acton

#15. Ink was not invented to express our real feelings.

Lord Acton

#16. 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

#17. It is easier to find people fit to govern themselves than people fit to govern others.

Lord Acton

#18. Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.

Lord Acton

#19. 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

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

Lord Acton

#21. 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

#22. Self-preservation and self-denial: the basis of all political economy.

Lord Acton

#23. There should be a law to the People besides its own will.

Lord Acton

#24. Before men can find peace and harmony within themselves they must first fall in love with their country.

Lord Acton

#25. Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.

Lord Acton

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. To develop and perfect and arm conscience is the great achievement of history.

Lord Acton

#29. Feudalism made land the measure and the master of all things.

Lord Acton

#30. Towns were the nursery of freedom.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#32. 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

#33. A people averse to the institution of private property is without the first elements of freedom

Lord Acton

#34. In England Parliament is above the law. In America the law is above Congress.

Lord Acton

#35. The mills of God grind slowly.

Lord Acton

#36. 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

#37. Men cannot be made good by the state, but they can easily be made bad. Morality depends on liberty.

Lord Acton

#38. Socialism easily accepts despotism. It requires the strongest execution of power
power sufficient to interfere with property.

Lord Acton

#39. 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.

Lord Acton

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.

Lord Acton

#43. 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

#44. The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern: every class is unfit to govern.

Lord Acton

#45. Official truth is not actual truth.

Lord Acton

#46. A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#48. The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.

Lord Acton

#49. Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.

Lord Acton

#50. Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.

Lord Acton

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#55. Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime ...

Lord Acton

#56. A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.

Lord Acton

#57. No public character has ever stood the revelation of private utterance and correspondence.

Lord Acton

#58. History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

Lord Acton

#59. 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

#60. Advice to Persons About to Write History - Don't.

Lord Acton

#61. Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#63. Good and evil lie close together. Seek no artistic unity in character.

Lord Acton

#64. 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

#65. It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.

Lord Acton

#66. 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

#67. Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.

Lord Acton

#68. Guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing

Lord Acton

#69. 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

#70. Judge talent at its best and character at its worst.

Lord Acton

#71. 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

#72. 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

#73. 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

#74. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority.

Lord Acton

#75. The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.

Lord Acton

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force.

Lord Acton

#79. Every error pronounces judgment on itself when it attempts to apply its rules to the standard of truth.

Lord Acton

#80. Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

Lord Acton

#81. There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.

Lord Acton

#82. Do not turn yourself from an end into a means-one does not justify the other.

Lord Acton

#83. There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success.

Lord Acton

#84. The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task.

Lord Acton

#90. Remember that one touch of ill-nature makes the whole world kin.

Lord Acton

#91. Piety sometimes gives birth to scruples, and faith to superstition, when they are not directed by wisdom and knowledge.

Lord Acton

#92. Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

Lord Acton

#93. I'm not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money.

Lord Acton

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

Lord Acton

#95. We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.

Lord Acton

#96. 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

#97. Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.

Lord Acton

#98. Be generous before you are just. Do not temper mercy with justice.

Lord Acton

#99. The test of liberty is the position and security of minorities.

Lord Acton