Great men are almost always bad men.
Lord ActonRead
Despotic power is always accompanied by corruption of morality.
Interpretation
Absolutism leads to moral decay.
Lord Acton's quote highlights the intrinsic link between unchecked power and the erosion of ethical values. It suggests that when authority becomes despotic, it not only affects the actions of those who wield it but also corrupts the moral framework of society, leading to a failure in integrity and justice.
In practice
Using this quote in a discussion about political power and its influence on ethics in governance.
Great men are almost always bad men.
Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Liberty and good government do not exclude each other; and there are excellent reasons why they should go together. Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end.
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is itself the highest political end...liberty is the only object which benefits all alike, and provokes no sincere opposition...The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. ~ Every class is unfit to govern ... Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.
Limitation is essential to authority. A government is legitimate only if it is effectively limited.
As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America's unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom - not least freedom of conscience.
There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
It seemed impossible that there could be people in the world who still desired food, who laughed, who neither knew nor cared that Sirius Black was gone forever.
Chiron had said once that nations were the most foolish of mortal inventions. "No man is worth more than another, wherever he is from.
But the most obvious fact about praise β whether of God or anything β strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
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