Top 125 Quotes & Sayings by Lord Acton - Page 2

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

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

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

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.

That great political idea, sanctifying freedom and consecrating it to God, teaching men to treasure the liberties of others as their own and to defend them for the love of justice and charity more than as a claim of right, has been the soul of what is great and good in the progress of the last two hundred years.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Political differences essentially depend on disagreement in moral principles.

A government does not desire its powers to be strictly defined, but the subjects require the line to be drawn with increasing precision.

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

I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo.

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

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.

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

Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.

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.

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

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

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

Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.

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.

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

Liberty, next to religion has been the motive of good deeds and the common pretext of crime, from the sowing of the seed at Athens, 2,460 years ago, until the ripened harvest was gathered by men of our race. It is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization; and scarcely a century has passed since nations, that knew the meaning of the term, resolved to be free. In every age its 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.

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

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

Everybody likes to get as much power as circumstances allow, and nobody will vote for a self-denying ordinance.

It is they [men of science] who hold the secret of the mysterious property of the mind by which error ministers to truth, and truth slowly but irrevocably prevails. Theirs is the logic of discovery, the demonstration of the advance of knowledge and the development of ideas, which as the earthly wants and passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark in history.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion.

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

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

Absolute power demoralizes.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Liberty is the harmony between the will and the law.

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.