Lord Acton on liberty vs. license

Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought.

~ Lord Acton

Lord Acton on democracy and elections

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.

~ Lord Acton, The History of Freedom and Other Essays (1907)

Lord Acton on ends and means

Liberty is not a means to a political end. It is itself the highest political end.

~ Lord Acton

Statue of Liberty
1922-1925

Lord Acton on federation and democracy

Of all the checks on democracy, federation has been the most efficacious and the most congenial . . . . . The federal system limits and restrains the sovereign power by dividing it and assigning to Government only certain defined rights. It is the only method of curbing not only the majority but the power of the whole people.

~ Lord Acton

Lord Acton on equality

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

~ Lord Acton

Lord Acton on the source of ideas

Few discoveries are more irritating than those which expose the pedigree of ideas.

~ Lord Acton

Lord Acton on the Civil War

Without presuming to decide the purely legal question, on which it seems evident to me from Madison's and Hamilton's papers that the Fathers of the Constitution were not agreed, I saw in State 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. The institutions of your Republic have not exercised on the old world the salutary and liberating influence which ought to have belonged to them, by reason of those defects and abuses of principle which the Confederate Constitution was expressly and wisely calculated to remedy. I believed that the example of that great Reform would have blessed all the races of mankind by establishing true freedom purged of the native dangers and disorders of Republics. 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.

~ Lord Acton, letter to Robert E. Lee on November 4, 1866

Lord Acton on government

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

~Lord Acton, letter to Mary Gladstone, April 24, 1881

Lord Acton on power

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.

~ Lord Acton, from a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887