Today, according to my handy, dandy Booklover’s Day Book, is Lord Acton’s birthday. I had heard of him, but couldn’t place him. It turns out that he’s the one said this: “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 to govern. Every class is unfit to govern…Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
I had never heard the part about “every class is unfit to govern.” I like that. We are unfit to rule over others for an indefinite period of time. After a while, we do get power-mad. We enjoy playing God. Acton was a historian and also a book-lover. This website says that he owned over 60.000 books when he died, and many of them had passages marked that he thought were significant. I thought I had a lot of books!