Lord Acton Quotes

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.

Liberty without virtue would be no blessing to us.

The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

While you live, while it is in your power, be good.

I just want to be as good a person as I can be.

There are multitudes of persons whose idea of liberty is the right to do what they please, instead of the right of doing that which is lawful and best.

Nature does not bestow virtue; to be good is an art.

Without integrity and conscience we lose our freedom.

It is not the business of the law to make anyone good or reverent or moral or clean or upright.

No longer virtuous no longer free; is a Maxim as true with regard to a private Person as a Common-wealth.

It profits me but little, after all, that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquility of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life.

Wrong is wrong only when you are at liberty to choose.

Most people don't have any association in their minds with what they do and with ethics. They think they somehow moved past the questions of morality or values or ethics, and that's something that I've never imagined to be true.

Since the branch of philosophy on which we are at present engaged differs from the others in not being a subject of merely intellectual interest — I mean we are not concerned to know what goodness essentially is, but how we are to become good men, for this alone gives the study its practical value — we must apply our minds to the solution of the problems of conduct.

Though we love goodness and not stealing, yet also we love freedom and not preaching.

Whose property is my body? Probably mine. I so regard it. If I experiment with it, who must be answerable? I, not the State. If I choose injudiciously, does the state die? Oh, no.

You cannot make men good by law.

Virtue alone is happiness below.

Goodness is not in the backyard of the individual nor in the open field of the collective; goodness flowers only in freedom from both.

Do what's right! Do the best you can and treat others the way you want to be treated because they will ask three questions: (1) Can I trust you? (2) Are you committed? (3) Do you care about me as a person?

To be good and to do good-that is the whole of religion.

Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

Good deeds are many, but good lives are few.

It is always so much easier to be moral than it is to be spiritual.