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
Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes.
There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men.
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.
Official truth is not actual truth.
A convinced man differs from a prejudiced man as an honest man from a liar.
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.
Absolute power demoralizes.
Ink was not invented to express our real feelings.
The mills of God grind slowly.
It is dangerous, at any time, to multiply sources of weakness.
The reward of history is that it releases and relieves us from present strife.
Government rules the present. Literature rules the future.
We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong.
Towns were the nursery of freedom.