“The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond the limits of things necessary for its well-being, it can only give indirect help to fight the battle of life by promoting the influences which prevail against temptation, — religion, education, and the distribution of wealth.”

— John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

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

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The State is competent to assign duties and draw the line between good and evil only in its immediate sphere. Beyond th…" by John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton?

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton photo

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton 112

British politician and historian 1834–1902

Related quotes

“Every living being is an engine geared to the wheelwork of the universe. Though seemingly affected only by its immediate surrounding, the sphere of external influence extends to infinite distance.”

Nikola Tesla (1856–1943) Serbian American inventor

“There is a battle shaping up in the world – a battle between the forces of archy – of statism, of political rule and authority – and its only alternative – anarchy, the absence of political rule. This battle is the necessary and logical consequence of the battle between individualism and collectivism, between liberty and the state, between freedom and slavery.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

“Objectivism and the State: An Open Letter to Ayn Rand,” 1969

“May we not say, perhaps, that the evil man is annihilated because he wished to be annihilated, or that he did not wish strongly enough to eternalize himself because he was evil? May we say that it is not believing in the other life which causes a man to be good, but rather that being good causes him believe in it? And what is being good and being evil? These states belong to the sphere of ethics, not of religion; or rather, does not the doing good though being evil pertain to ethics, and the being good [forgivable] though doing evil, to religion?”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), X : Religion, the Mythology of the Beyond and the Apocatastasis

“In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.”

George Raymond Richard Martin (1948) American writer, screenwriter and television producer

infinity plus interview (2001)
Variant: In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.
Context: The battle between good and evil is a legitimate theme for a Fantasy (or for any work of fiction, for that matter), but in real life that battle is fought chiefly in the individual human heart. Too many contemporary Fantasies take the easy way out by externalizing the struggle, so the heroic protagonists need only smite the evil minions of the dark power to win the day. And you can tell the evil minions, because they're inevitably ugly and they all wear black.
I wanted to stand much of that on its head.
In real life, the hardest aspect of the battle between good and evil is determining which is which.

“Moral education is not mere drill in the ways of the herd. The good man's first duty, as Professor Erskine says, is to be intelligent. Good intentions alone do not enable man to judge wisely or behave well. The prevailing idea that one can be at the same time good and stupid has strongly influenced our education.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: The Meaning of a Liberal Education (1926), p. 180

“We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.”

Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) American politician, 26th president of the United States

State of the Union address (2 December 1902)
1900s
Context: Our aim is not to do away with corporations; on the contrary, these big aggregations are an inevitable development of modern industrialism, and the effort to destroy them would be futile unless accomplished in ways that would work the utmost mischief to the entire body politic. We can do nothing of good in the way of regulating and supervising these corporations until we fix clearly in our minds that we are not attacking the corporations, but endeavoring to do away with any evil in them. We are not hostile to them; we are merely determined that they shall be so handled as to subserve the public good. We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth.