All Quotes

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"[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."

"By Universal History I understand that which is distinct from the combined history of all countries, which is not a rope of sand, but a continuous development, and is not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul. It moves in a succession to which the nations are subsidiary. Their story will be told, not for their own sake, but in reference and subordination to a higher series, according to the time and the degree in which they contribute to the common fortunes of Mankind."

"General principles were so little apparent in the system that excellent writers suppose that the Whigs were essentially English, Nonconformists, associated with limited monarchy, unfit for exportation over the world. They took long to outgrow the narrow limits of the society in which they arose. A hundred years passed before Whiggism assumed the universal and scientific character. In the American speeches of Chatham and Camden, in Burke's writings from 1778 to 1783, in the Wealth of Nations, and the tracts of Sir William Jones, there is an immense development. The national bounds are overcome. The principles are sacred, irrespective of interests. The charter of Rhode Island is worth more than the British Constitution, and Whig statesmen toast General Washington, rejoice that America has resisted, and insist on the acknowledgment of independence. The progress is entirely consistent; and Burke's address to the colonists is the logical outcome of the principles of liberty and the notion of a higher law above municipal codes and constitutions, with which Whiggism began."

"The judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both should be checks upon that."

"[T]he Revolution of 1688...is the greatest thing done by the English nation. It established the State upon a contract, and set up the doctrine that a breach of contract forfeited the crown. ... Parliament gave the crown, and gave it under conditions. Parliament became supreme in administration as well as in legislation. The king became its servant on good behaviour, liable to dismissal for himself or his ministers. All this was not restitution, but inversion. Passive obedience had been the law of England. Conditional obedience and the right of resistance became the law. Authority was limited and regulated and controlled. The Whig theory of government was substituted for the Tory theory on the fundamental points of political science. The great achievement is that this was done without bloodshed, without vengeance, without exclusion of entire parties, with so little definiteness in point of doctrine that it could be accepted, and the consequences could be left to work themselves out."

"I am not thinking of those shining precepts which are the registered property of every school; that is to say — learn as much by writing as by reading; be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites; keep men and things apart; guard against the prestige of great names; see that your judgments are your own; and do not shrink from disagreement; no trusting without testing; be more severe to ideas than to actions; do not overlook the strength of the bad cause of the weakness of the good; never be surprised by the crumbling of an idol or the disclosure of a skeleton; judge talent at its best and character at its worst; suspect power more than vice, and study problems in preference to periods."

"Most of this, I suppose, is undisputed, and calls for no enlargement. But the weight of opinion is against me when 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. The plea in extenuation of guilt and mitigation of punishment is perpetual. 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. The men who plot to baffle and resist us are, first of all, those who made history what it has become. They set up the principle that only a foolish Conservative judges the present time with the ideas of the past; that only a foolish Liberal judges the past with the ideas of the present."

"Praise is the shipwreck of historians."

"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 the passions of men remain almost unchanged, are the charter of progress, and the vital spark of history."

"History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and the most active."

"Liberalism is really opposed to liberty. ... Modern liberalism in England as well as abroad, in America as well as in Europe, has done more to destroy liberty than monarchy has done."

"What one hears in Ranke. The whisper of statecraft. Not the tramp of democracy's earthquake feet. Not the dull roar of surging opinion."

"Sagacity in judging the value of testimony is his [Ranke's] only supreme quality."

"The Massacre of St. Bartholomew saved England. Coligny would have conquered Belgium."

"There is no example of liberty established by Protestants resisting Catholics. The French tried it and failed. The Dutch in like manner. The victory came out of the conflict of Protestants with Protestants."

"Reformation. Scotland is the only kingdom in which the change was accomplished in spite of the crown. Ireland the only country where it was prevented in spite of the crown."

"Religious liberty came not from the Reformation or from the sects as a whole but from particular sects...especially those which the Reformation sought to exterminate."

"The only resistance ever made to Louis XIV was from religion."

"The early history of the world is the history of a few great men. Their Wirkungskreis is immense—vaster than that of God himself."

"The lesson of modern history—that Religions enjoy (are endowed with) the prerogative of perpetual youth while philosophies seldom outlast a generation."

"Liberty becomes a question of morals more that politics."

"Authority that does not exist for Liberty is not authority but force."

"Liberty is the prevention of control by others. This requires self-control and, therefore, religious and spiritual influences; education, knowledge, well-being."

"Property, not Conscience, is the basis of liberty. For the defence of Conscience need not arise. Property is always exposed to State interference. It is the constant object of policy."

"The strongest of all the obstacles to progress, the reign of the dead."

"S. B. is the greatest crime of modern times. It was committed on principles professed by Rome. It was approved, sanctioned, praised by the papacy. The Holy See went out of its way to signify to the world, by permanent and solemn acts, how entirely it admired a king who slaughtered his subjects treacherously, because they were Protestants. To proclaim forever that because a man is a Protestant it is a pious deed to cut his throat in the night."

"Democracy is government of the strongest, just as military despotism is. This is a bond of connection between the two. They are the brutal forms of government and as strength and authority go together, necessarily arbitrarily."

"A government which cannot be reformed does not merit to be preserved."

"Property is not the sacred right. When a rich man becomes poor it is a misfortune, it is not a moral evil. When a poor man becomes destitute, it is a moral evil, teeming with consequences injurious to society and morality. Therefore, in last resort, the poor have a claim on the wealth of the rich, so far that they may be relieved from the immoral, demoralizing effects of poverty."

"Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the tablets of eternity."

"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."

"He represented to a world not altogether sympathetic the worth and dignity of historical studies. He showed their real importance for a right understanding of the destiny of man, however regarded. He demonstrated also in his own person that history was not at once the Cinderella of the sciences and the playmate of the arts, below scientific inquiry as a means of training the mind to exact thought, and behind classical studies as an instrument of culture; but that if properly and consistently pursued it was a mental gymnastic of the highest order, and a great trainer in patience, sympathy, and refinement. He made history respectable."

"Twenty years ago, late at night, in his library at Cannes, he expounded to me his view of how such a history of Liberty might be written, and in what wise it might be made the central thread of all history. He spoke for six or seven minutes only; but he spoke like a man inspired, seeming as if, from some mountain summit high in air, he saw beneath him the far-winding path of human progress from dim Cimmerian shores of prehistoric shadow into the fuller yet broken and fitful light of the modern time. The eloquence was splendid, but greater than the eloquence was the penetrating vision which discerned through all events and in all ages the play of those moral forces, now creating, now destroying, always transmuting, which had moulded and remoulded institutions, and had given to the human spirit its ceaselessly-changing forms of energy. It was as if the whole landscape of history had been suddenly lit up by a burst of sunlight. I have never heard from any other lips any discourse like this, nor from his did I ever hear the like again."

"Men during the World War used to recall the prescience of Acton when he declared that the bayonets of Berlin constituted the most serious menace to our Empire."

"We can picture his mind as constantly knitting history together, then; and, though he failed to produce his magnum opus, he left behind him in his papers a tremendous intellectual system, which has stimulated many commentators and interpreters in our time... [B]ehind the multitude of Acton's reflective notes there is an intellectual system (and a record of the man's achievement) ampler and richer and more imposing than the published writings would suggest. The notes are an evidence of Acton's amazing intellectual integrity, his determination to confront the discrepant fact and not to shrink from the inconvenient anomaly."

"To-morrow I am going to London to meet at dinner Lord Acton, whom I have long been pining to see. He is a Roman Catholic, and is the most learned Englishman now alive, but he never writes anything."

"I have had a long correspondence with Lord Acton, and now begin to understand him. He demands that history should be primarily a branch of the moral sciences, and should aim at proving the immutable righteousness of the ideas of modern Liberalism—tolerance and the supremacy of conscience. He has used me as a peg to indicate that belief. He is revising his original remarks, but I do not expect that much clearness will ensue, though it will be very interesting."

"Acton may have been a wise man, but he was an indifferent historian, often surprised by the discovery of intrigue or double-dealing behind an official façade into a somewhat amateurish reaction: astonishment at the commonplace, overemphasis on the insignificant, heavily moral attitudes."

"[Acton knew] at least four foreign languages, and probably read and annotated more printed matter than anyone who has ever lived. And he was cosmopolitan in the intimate as well as in the superficial sense, for as a liberal Roman Catholic he was equally versed in the literature of authority and revolt, and knew, as no other Englishman, the great central tradition of post-Tridentine theology."

"Fri. a long talk with Ld. Acton in the garden, an hour and ½, mostly about various people and rather amusing. He has a shrewd eye for character, and yet charitable."

"He [Lord Acton] gave Herbert and me the History of Liberty, a sketch of it, most interesting. It is extraordinary the way he tingles with it to his fingers ends and yet can sit patient and quiet over wife and children and wait and wait another year before he writes it. What an extraordinary man."

"His work may be put on the Index; but that is all. They will never excommunicate an English Peer. I always say that, if Lord Acton had written what Döllinger has written, and vice versa, it would still have been the Professor who would have got into trouble, while the Peer would have escaped scot free."

"Johnny Acton, who is extremely agreeable, left us two or three days ago to go to Germany, with the intention of coming back to study in the middle of October. His library is becoming immense. He has remodelled the old library. He has entirely filled the hall; he has furnished his own room with books, and he has bagged a bedroom for the same purpose. I can hardly open a book without finding notes or marks of his."

"[A] master of contemporary history...an impartial judge of modern England, so European, so supernational, so catholic, so liberal, so wise, so Olympian, so serene."