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"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."

John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, KCVO, DL (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902), known as Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Bt from 1837 to 1869 and usually referred to simply as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer


Acton took a great interest in America, considering its Federal structure the perfect guarantor of individual liberties. During the American Civil War, his sympathies lay entirely with the Confederacy, for their defense of States' Rights against a centralized government that, by all historical precedent, would inevitably turn tyrannical. His notes to Gladstone on the subject helped sway many in the British government to sympathize with the South. After the South's surrender, he wrote to Robert E. Lee that "I mourn for the stake which was lost at Richmond more deeply than I rejoice over that which was saved at Waterloo," adding that he "deemed that you were fighting battles for our liberty, our progress, and our civilization

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means. You would hang a man of no position like Ravaillac; but if what one hears is true, then Elizabeth asked the gaoler to murder Mary, and William III. ordered his Scots minister to extirpate a clan. Here are the greatest names coupled with the greatest crimes; you would spare those criminals, for some mysterious reason. I would hang them higher than Haman, for reasons of quite obvious justice, still more, still higher for the sake of historical science

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Notable quotations
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[4][11][12][13][14]
"Great men are almost always bad men."[4][15]
“There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”[4]
“The one pervading evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather of that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.” [16]
“Be not content with the best book; seek sidelights from the others; have no favourites.”[17]
"The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks."[18]
"Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity."[19]
"The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern."[20]
"There is no error so monstrous that it fails to find defenders among the ablest men."[20]
"At all times sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities, that have prevailed by associating themselves with auxiliaries whose objects differed from their own; and this association, which is always dangerous, has been sometimes disastrous, by giving to opponents just grounds of opposition."[21]
“Universal History is . . . not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.”[22]
"There is not a more perilous or immoral habit of mind than the sanctifying of success." (said of Oliver Cromwell)[23]
“The strong man with the dagger is followed by the weak man with the sponge.”[24][25]
"The science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the streams of history, like the grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to making the future."[26]
"Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin."[27]
"Liberty is not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought."[28]
"Study problems in preference to periods."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dalberg-Acton,_1st_Baron_Acton