Lord Acton
Lord Acton
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, KCVO DL—known as Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Baronet from 1837 to 1869 and usually referred to simply as Lord Acton—was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He was the only son of Sir Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton, 7th Baronet and a grandson of the Neapolitan admiral Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet. He is perhaps best known for the remark, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionHistorian
Date of Birth10 January 1834
The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom.
When you perceive a truth, look for the balancing truth.
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.
A liberal is only a bundle of prejudices until he has mastered, has understood, experienced the philosophy of Conservatism.
Live both in the future and the past. Who does not live in the past does not live in the future.
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Official truth is not actual truth.
A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.
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.
Moral precepts are constant through the ages and not obedient to circumstances.
The will of the people cannot make just that which is unjust.
Liberty is the prevention of control by others.
The form of government and the condition of society must always correspond. Social equality is therefore a postulate of pure democracy.
At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects often differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has sometimes been disastrous.