Lord Acton Quotes
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.
Acton, John Emerich Edward Dalberg. Letter to Mandell Creighton, 5 Apr. 1887. Published in Historical Essays and Studies, Macmillan and Co., 1907, p. 504.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Perhaps the most famous quotation in all of Political Science is this one. What is fascinating is that 74 years earlier, Shelly, the most famous of the English Poets expressed the same idea in one of his great poems. See {627920}. The last sentence of this quote is often excluded.
Caro had studied political power and had written “The Power Brokers.”
This is a variation of the famous Lord Acton quotation: {292904}.
He was expelled from Parliament for such.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He was the only son of Sir Ferdinand Dalberg-Acton, 7th Baronet, and a grandson of the Neapolitan admiral and prime minister Sir John Acton, 6th Baronet. Between 1837 and 1869 he was known as Sir John Dalberg-Acton, 8th Baronet.
