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John Acton cytaty
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John Acton, właśc. John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1. baron Acton – brytyjski historyk, filozof polityczny, teoretyk wolności i polityk. Bardziej znany jako Lord Acton. Najbardziej znany jest ze stwierdzenia "Władza korumpuje, a władza absolutna korumpuje absolutnie" . Wikipedia  

✵ 10. Styczeń 1834 – 19. Czerwiec 1902
John Acton Fotografia
John Acton: 120   Cytatów 1   Polubienie

John Acton słynne cytaty

„Każda władza deprawuje, a władza absolutna deprawuje absolutnie.”

John Acton

Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. (ang.)
Źródło: list do biskupa Mandella Creightona, 3 kwietnia 1887

„Najwspanialszą szansę, przed którą kiedykolwiek stanął świat, odrzucono, gdyż namiętność do równości uczyniła płonną nadzieję na wolność.”

John Acton

„Wolność polega na świadomym i dobrowolnym wyborze dobra. Wolność to nie moc czynienia tego, co chcemy, lecz prawo bycia zdolnym do czynienia naszej powinności.”

John Acton

„Szczerzy przyjaciele wolności byli zawsze rzadkością, a jej triumfy były dziełem mniejszości, które zwyciężały, stowarzyszając się z pomocnikami o celach często zupełnie odmiennych; i ten związek, który zawsze jest niebezpieczny, czasami okazywał się katastrofalny, dając przeciwnikom słuszne podstawy do opozycji i wzniecając spory o łupy w godzinie sukcesu.”

John Acton

„Szlak nacjonalizmu będzie napiętnowany zarówno materialną, jak moralną ruiną, nieuniknioną, by nowy wymysł mógł zatryumfować nad dziełami Boga i interesem ludzkości.”

John Acton

Źródło: Wiara i wolność

„Przez wolność rozumiem stan gwarantujący każdemu człowiekowi ochronę w czynieniu tego, co uważa za swój obowiązek”

John Acton

John Acton: Cytaty po angielsku

“It was manifest that all persons who had learned that political science is an affair of conscience rather than of might or expediency, must regard their adversaries as men without principle, that the controversy between them would perpetually involve morality, and could not be governed by the plea of good intentions which softens down the asperities of religious strife. Nearly all the greatest men of the seventeenth century repudiated the innovation. In the eighteenth, the two ideas of Grotius, that there are certain political truths by which every state and every interest must stand or fall, and that society is knit together by a series of real and hypothetical contracts, became, in other hands, the lever that displaced the world. When, by what seemed the operation of an irresistible and constant law, royalty had prevailed over all enemies and all competitors, it became a religion. Its ancient rivals, the baron and the prelate, figured as supporters by its side.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

“To proclaim the Pope infallible was their compendious security against hostile States and Churches, against human liberty and authority, against disintegrating tolerance and rationalizing science, against error and sin.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"The Vatican Council," http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3011302;view=1up;seq=187 The North British Review (1870)

“Patriotism is in political life what faith is in religion, and it stands to the domestic feelings and to home-sickness as faith to fanaticism and to superstition.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Nationality" (1862)

“I have fixed my eyes on the spaces that heaven’s light illuminates, that I may not lay too heavy a strain on the indulgence with which you have accompanied me over the dreary and heartbreaking course by which men have passed to freedom; and because the light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

“Whenever a single definite object is made the supreme end of the State, be it the advantage of a class, the safety of the power of the country, the greatest happiness of the greatest number, or the support of any speculative idea, the State becomes for the time inevitably absolute. Liberty alone demands for its realisation the limitation of the public authority, for liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Nationality" (1862)

“The man who prefers his country before every other duty shows the same spirit as the man who surrenders every right to the State. They both deny that right is superior to authority.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Nationality" (1862)

“The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism of human authorities ended disastrously. …In the very year 586 [BCE], in which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“According to the common opinion indirect elections are a safeguard of conservatism. But all the Assemblies of the French Revolution issued from indirect elections.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“Legally and to outward seeming the American President is the successor of Washington, and still enjoys powers devised and limited by the Convention of Philadelphia. In reality the new President differs from the Magistrate imagined by the Fathers of the Republic as widely as Monarchy from Democracy…”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

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

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

James Anthony Froude, in the lecture "The Science of History" (5 February 1864); published in Representative Essays (1885) by George Haven Putnam, p. 274; Lord Acton quoted Froude in an address "The Study of History" (11 June 1895) http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1906acton.html, which led to this being widely attributed to him. The phrase has also sometimes been misquoted as: Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral laws are written on the table of eternity.
Misattributed

“In ancient times the State absorbed authorities not its own, and intruded on the domain of personal freedom. In the Middle Ages it possessed too little authority, and suffered others to intrude. Modern States fall habitually into both excesses.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“The idea that religious liberty is the generating principle of civil, and that civil liberty is the necessary condition of religious, was a discovery reserved for the seventeenth century.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Christianity (1877)

“What followed, during many generations, was the cruel domination of class over class, the oppression of the poor by the rich, and of the ignorant by the wise. The spirit of that domination found passionate utterance in the verses of the aristocratic poet Theognis,… who longed to drink the blood of his political adversaries. From these oppressors the people of many cities sought deliverance in the less intolerable tyranny of revolutionary usurpers. The remedy gave new shape and energy to the evil. …rights secured by equal laws and by sharing power existed nowhere.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“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.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Letter to Mary Gladstone (1881)

“Six hundred years before the birth of Christ absolutism held unbounded sway. Throughout the East it was propped by the unchanging influence of priests and armies. In the West, where there were no sacred books requiring trained interpreters, the priesthood acquired no preponderance, and when the kings were overthrown their powers passed to aristocracies of birth.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“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.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

As quoted in Essays on Freedom and Power, Introduction, p. xlvii (1949) https://mises.org/sites/default/files/Essays%20on%20Freedom%20and%20Power_3.pdf

“The great question is, to discover not what governments prescribe, but what they ought to prescribe; for no prescription is valid against the conscience of mankind.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“The sentiment on which [papal] infallibility was founded could not be reached by argument, the weapon of human reason, but resided in conclusions transcending evidence, and was the inaccessible postulate rather than a demonstrable consequence of a system of religious faith.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"The Vatican Council," http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b3011302;view=1up;seq=187 The North British Review (1870)

“The government of the Israelites was a Federation, held together by no political authority, but by the unity of… faith and founded not on physical force but on a voluntary covenant. The principle of self-government was carried out not only in each tribe, but in every group of at least 120 families; and there was neither privilege of rank nor inequality before the law. Monarchy was so alien to the primitive spirit of the community that it was resisted by Samuel… The throne was erected on a compact; and the king was deprived of the right of legislation among a people that recognised no lawgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was to… make its government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws, which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed… to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted consciences of the masses. Thus the… Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won—the doctrine of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development… and the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man. The operation of these principles… occupies the whole of the space we are going over together.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Źródło: The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“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.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Introductory note to G.P. Gooch's Annals of Politics and Culture https://archive.org/stream/annalsofpolitics00goociala#page/n5/mode/2up, p. xxxlv (1901)

“A century ago it was perfectly well known that whoever had one audience of a Master in Chancery was made to pay for three, but no man heeded the enormity until it suggested to a young lawyer that it might be well to question and examine with rigorous suspicion every part of a system in which such things were done. The day on which that gleam lighted up the clear hard mind of Jeremy Bentham is memorable in the political calendar beyond the entire administration of many statesmen.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“Their [Athenians] history furnishes the classic example of the peril of Democracy under conditions singularly favourable. For the Athenians were not only brave and patriotic and capable of generous sacrifice, but they were the most religious of the Greeks. They venerated the constitution which had given them prosperity and equality and the pride of freedom…They tolerated considerable variety of opinion, and great license of speech…Thus they became the only people of antiquity that grew great by democratic institutions. But the possession of unlimited power, which corrodes the conscience, hardens the heart, and confounds the understanding of monarchs exercised its demoralizing influence on the illustrious Democracy of Athens.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“The Stoics could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“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.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Letter (4 November 1866) http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/acton-lee.html to Robert E. Lee

“It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the Acts of fifty Parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the Five Codes of France.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

p, 125
The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

“A State which is incompetent to satisfy different races condemns itself; a State which labours to neutralise, to absorb, or to expel them, destroys its own vitality; a State which does not include them is destitute of the chief basis of self-government. The theory of nationality, therefore, is a retrograde step in history.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

"Nationality" (1862)

“Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

Letter (23 January 1861), published in Lord Acton and his Circle (1906) by Abbot Gasquet, Letter 74

“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.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The Study of History (1895)

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

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

As quoted in Maxed Out : Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2007) by James D. Scurlock; The quote does not appear in any of Acton's published writings. Ezra Pound attributes the exact quotation to Sir Alexander James Cockburn, Lord Chief Justice of England in Pound, Ezra. "'Ezra Pound Speaking': Radio Speeches of World War II", ed. Leonard W. Doob (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 219. https://archive.org/stream/EzraPoundSpeaking-RadioSpeechesOfWorldWarIi/EzraPoundSpeaking#page/n116/mode/1up/search/Lord+Chief+Justice
Misattributed

“But it may be urged, on the other side, that Liberty is not the sum or substitute for of all things men ought to live for... to be real it must be circumscribed... advancing civilisation invests the state with increased rights and duties, and imposes increased burdens and constraints on the subject... a highly instructed and intelligent community may perceive the benefit of compulsory obligations which, at a lower stage, would be thought unbearable... liberal progress is not vague or indefinite, but aims at a point where the public is subject to no restrictions but those of which it feels the advantage... a free country may be less capable of doing much for the advancement of religion, the prevention of vice, or the relief of suffering, than one that does not shrink from confronting great emergencies by some sacrifice of individual rights, and some concentration of power... the supreme political object ought to be sometimes postponed to still higher moral objects. My argument involves no collision with these qualifying reflections. We are dealing, not with the effects of freedom, but with its causes. ...influences which brought arbitrary government under control, either by the diffusion of power, or to an appeal to an authority which transcends all government, and among these influences the greatest philosophers of Greece have no claim to be reckoned.”

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

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