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… is from page 387 of Lord Acton’s essay “The Influence of America [2],” which is reprinted in Essays in the Liberal Interpretation of History [3] (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 [4]:
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.