… is from page 387 of Lord Acton’s essay “The Influence of America,” which is reprinted in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History (William H. McNeill, ed., 1967); this essay – a lecture given by Acton at Cambridge University in the 1890s – was originally published posthumously in 1910 in Acton’s Lectures on the French Revolution:
The great inlet by which a colour for oppression has entered into the world is by one man’s pretending to determine concerning the happiness of another.
