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Lord Acton (1834-1902)

Udvalgt af Rune Engelbreth Larsen

LORD ACTON: »By liberty I mean the assurance that every man shall be protected in doing what he believes his duty against the influence of authority and majorities, custom and opinion.«

LORD ACTON: »The most certain test by which we judge whether a country is really free is the amount of security enjoyed by minorities.«

LORD ACTON: »According to a famous saying of the most famous authoress of the Continent, liberty is ancient, and it is despotism that is new. It has been the pride of recent historians to vindicate the truth of that maxim. The heroic age of Greece confirms it, and it is still more conspicuously true of Teutonic Europe.«

LORD ACTON: »It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority. For there is a reserve of latent power in the masses which, if it is called into play, the minority can seldom resist.«

LORD ACTON: »Men have no right to do what they please with their own, or to make profit out of another's loss. Such is the political wisdom of the ancients, touching the foundations of liberty, as we find it in its highest development, in Cicero, and Seneca, and Philo, a Jew of Alexandria.«

LORD ACTON: »There is hardly a truth in politics or in the system of the rights of man that was not grasped by the wisest of the Gentiles and the Jews, or that they did not declare with a refinement of thought and a nobleness of expression that later writers could never surpass.«

Fra THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN ANTIQUITY, 1877