John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton - History Quotes

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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.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Writers the most learned, the most accurate in details, and the soundest in tendency, frequently fall into a habit which can neither be cured nor pardoned — the habit of making history into the proof of their theories.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of History.
If we may debase the currency for the sake of genius, or success, or rank, or reputation, we may debase it for the sake of a man's influence, of his religion, of his party, of the good cause which prospers by his credit and suffers by his disgrace. Then History ceases to be a science, an arbiter of controversy, a guide of the Wanderer, the upholder of that moral standard which the powers of earth and religion itself tend constantly to depress. It serves where it ought to reign; and it serves the worst cause better than the purest.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
I have reached the end of my time, and have hardly come to the beginning of my task. In the ages of which I have spoken, the history of freedom was the history of the thing that was not. But since the Declaration of Independence, or, to speak more justly, since the Spaniards, deprived of their king, made a new government for themselves, the only known forms of Liberty, Republics and Constitutional Monarchy, have made their way over the world.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
Advice to Persons About to Write History— Don't.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The great object, in trying to understand history, political, religious, literary or scientific, is to get behind men and to grasp ideas.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
The wisdom of divine rule appears not in the perfection but in the improvement of the world... History is the true demonstration of Religion.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton
I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton