Word: acton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Elected to the other offices in the class were Christiane Gaugier of Lynchburg, Va., and Cabot Hall as vice-president; Cynthia L. Heath of West Acton, Mass., and Briggs Hall as secretary; and Frances M. Lane of Wakefield, Mass., and Moors Hall as treasurer...
Quoting Anatole France, Lord Acton, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Dever's speech was a vehement defense of the Democratic record and a denunciation of the "first hundred days" of the Eisenhower administration. "But," Dever said, "liberalism, like General MacArthur, will return...
...political science, they will begin to trace "the development of the concept of liberty" by reading the works of Lord Acton and De Tocqueville. Then, in Renaissance literature, they will be concerned with the development of the individual, and later, when they get into the Reformation, with the individual in relation to God. Their biology may begin with Darwin's Origin of Species, their psychology with the writings of Pavlov; their physics will include the works of Von Helmholtz. Even their foreign languages will be involved in the study of ideas-Voltaire in French, Cervantes in Spanish, Dante...
...history is a continuous development; it is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul." A slavish objectivity subverts the purpose of history: a historian must not only be a judge, but a "hanging judge" as well. "The inflexible integrity of the moral code," said Acton, "is, to me. the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history . . . Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity...
...Perhaps, Acton admitted, man would never find this moral law, but should he ever cease trying, all true progress would cease, too. Progress is nothing less than the "striving to know and to love God," and the human conscience is nothing less than God's "ambassador." The study of history, therefore, is essentially the study of conscience. "The weight of opinion is against me," cried Acton to his students, "when 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...