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Portrait of Lord Acton

Lord Acton

141 quotes in 738 categories

Institutions can hide the truth and trick people, especially when power is involved. The quotes point out that laws should guide leaders, not the other way around. They also say that a person’s character shows up more in feelings than in actions.

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Lord Acton was an English historian and politician who warned that power can corrupt, famously saying 'absolute power corrupts absolutely'.

Quick Facts About Lord Acton

Notable works: Vatican Council

About Lord Acton

John Emerich Edward Dalberg‑Acton, known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, Liberal politician, and writer. He championed individual liberty and argued that concentrated authority is dangerous. In an 1887 letter he wrote, 'Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' emphasizing the threat of unchecked power to freedom.

Quotes by Lord Acton

Official truth is not actual truth.

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

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Progress, the religion of those who have none.

Funny

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Every class is unfit to govern.

Class

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The mills of God grind slowly.

Daily grind

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Towns were the nursery of freedom.

Freedom

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Socialism means slavery.

Capitalism

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Absolute power demoralizes.

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Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.

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

Class

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History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys.

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The common vice of democracy is disregard for morality.

Character

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

Absolute power

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

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

Advice

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

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Federalism is the best curb on democracy. [It] assigns limited powers to the central government. Thereby all power is limited. It excludes…

Absolute power

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

Character

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At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities…

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From the absolute will of an entire people there is no appeal, no redemption, no refuge but treason.

Absolutes

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

Art

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A generous spirit prefers that his country should be poor, and weak, and of no account, but free, rather than powerful, prosperous,…

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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…

Democracy

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

Character

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Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and…

Absolute power

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I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the…

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Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which…

Absolute power

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Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil.…

Character

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There are many things the government cant do, many good purposes it must renounce. It must leave them to the enterprise of…

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The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in…

Action

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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…

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Judge not according to the orthodox standard of a system religious, philosophical, political, but according as things promote, or fail to promote…

Authority

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Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the…

Age

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Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety…

Absolutes

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It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to…

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I saw in States' rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will, and secession filled me with hope,…

Absolutism

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The epoch of doubt and transition during which the Greeks passed from the dim fancies of mythology to the fierce light of…

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The barbarians, who possessed no books, no secular knowledge, no education, except in the schools of the clergy, and who had scarcely…

Attachment

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It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to…

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For centuries it was never discovered that education was a function of the State, and the State never attempted to educate. But…

Absolutism

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Lord Acton by topic

Men (25) Politics (23) Freedom (22) Liberty (19) Government (17) Inspirational (14) Political (13) History (13) Power (12) Character (12) Religion (11) Authority (11) Democracy (10) Absolutes (10) Absolute power (10)