John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian
1880s, Letter to Mary Gladstone (1881)
Letter to Mary Gladstone (1881)
Context: 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.
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton (1834–1902) British politician and historian
1880s, Letter to Mary Gladstone (1881)
William McKinley (1843–1901) American politician, 25th president of the United States (in office from 1897 to 1901)
Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist
The Education of Henry Adams (1907)
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China
On Practice (1937)
Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician
Source: "Evolutionary Socialism" (1899) https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1899/evsoc/index.htm, Chapter III, The Tasks and Possibilities of Social Democracy
William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom
Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1864/may/11/second-reading in the House of Commons (11 May 1864) <br class="br">1860s <br class="br">Context: I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the Constitution.... fitness for the franchise, when it is shown to exist—as I say it is shown to exist in the case of a select portion of the working class—is not repelled on sufficient grounds from the portals of the Constitution by the allegation that things are well as they are. I contend, moreover, that persons who have prompted the expression of such sentiments as those to which I have referred, and whom I know to have been Members of the working class, are to be presumed worthy and fit to discharge the duties of citizenship, and that to admission to the discharge of those duties they are well and justly entitled.
Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution
Source: State and Revolution
Ilana Mercer South African writer
“All the President's Women (Well, Almost),” http://www.wnd.com/2014/10/all-the-presidents-women-well-almost WorldNetDaily.com, October 2, 2014. <br class="br">2010s, 2014
Lysander Spooner book No Treason
Source: No Treason (1867–1870), No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority, p. 63, Appendix, last sentence
Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Voprosi Leninizma, Gosudarstvennoe izdatelstvo politicheskoy literaturi, (1939)
Stalin's speeches, writings and authorised interviews