Lord Acton Quotes

The Framers (of the Constitution) were not concerned primarily with favoring one type of government over another, but with limiting the power of government, regardless of its source.

The legitimate acts of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others.

Government is no sooner created than it becomes too strong for society, and shapes and moulds, as well as controls it.

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size.

You have to ask yourself, 'Who owns me? Do I own myself or am I just another piece of government property?'

Individual liberty depends upon keeping government under control.

If people cannot limit government they will not for long be free.

Government means always coercion and compulsion and is by necessity the opposite of liberty. Government is a guarantor of liberty and is compatible with liberty only if its range is adequately restricted to the preservation of economic freedom. Where there is no market economy, the best-intentioned provisions of constitutions and laws remain a dead letter.

The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents.

There can be no such thing as "limited government," because there is no way to control an entity that in principle enjoys a monopoly of power.

There is nothing government can give you that it hasn't taken from you in the first place.

[J]ust because you have an individual right does not mean that the state or local government can't constrain the exercise of that right.

Government money only pays for the "liberties" the government thinks you should have, and therefore it can determine how you exercise them. That turns liberties into privileges dispensed at the whim of the state.

As government grows, freedom recedes.

Government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us.

Government is the natural enemy of freedom.

The object of a Constitution is to restrain the Government, as that of laws is to restrain individuals.

Governments, whatever their pretensions otherwise, try to preserve themselves by holding the individual down ... Government itself, indeed, may be reasonably defined as a conspiracy against him. Its one permanent aim, whatever its form, is to hobble him sufficiently to maintain itself.

You ardently strive for freedom, and I do wish you were free--but, rather than for your sake, so that government won't be.

The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties.

The state is or can be master of money, but in a free society it is master of very little else.

A government that understands the limits of power as well as its potential.

You know why I got involved in politics? The government is now a majority partner in my life. I am now a minority partner in my own life.

Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed - first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf.

Our government, taxes, and ideas of freedom are already duplicates of the Old World. Our politicians determine how we should live our lives - and our individual liberties are sacrificed for the benefit of the Fatherland.