John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Praise is the shipwreck of historians.

At every step we are met by arguments which go to excuse, to palliate, to confound right and wrong, and reduce the just man to the level of the reprobate.

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 …

[I]t will not do to act as if the moral question was not the supreme question in public life, and, in a sense, the vera causa of party conflict.

If it can be shown that the majority of women will probably be Liberal, or that they will divide equally, I should say that the balance is, very slightly, in favour of giving them votes.

The immediate purpose with which the Italians and Germans effected the great change in European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. Machiavelli's hour had come.

Almost all that has been done for the good of the people has been done since the right lost the monopoly of power, since the rights of property were discovered to be not unlimited.

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 danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern. The law of liberty tends to abolish the reign of race over race, of faith over faith, of class over class.

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 …

Don't suspect me of denying the principle of nationality altogether. Only, if I were to say as much as you say, I should be afraid of being driven to admit the priority of National Independence before individual liberty,—of the figurative …

Nationality is the great carrier of custom, of unreflecting habit and transmitted ideas that quench individuality. Conscience gives men force to resist and discard all this. Nationality has to be dealt with discriminatingly. It is not …

History provides neither compensation for suffering nor penalties for wrong.

Put conscience above both system and success.

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.

In the Moral Sciences Prejudice is Dishonesty.

ADVICE TO PERSONS ABOUT TO WRITE HISTORY — DON’T

the end learns to justify the means.

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

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I do think that, of the three greatest Liberals, Burke is equally good in speaking and writing; Macaulay better in writing, and Mr. Gladstone better in speaking.

We understand the work and place of Pascal, or Newton, or Montesquieu, or Adam Smith, when we have measured the gap between the state of astronomy, of political economy, &c., before they came and after they were gone. And the progress of …

The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas. Ideas have a radiation and development, an ancestry and posterity of their own

The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.