Lord Acton

It would be easy to point out a paragraph in St. Augustine, or a sentence of Grotius that outweighs in influence the acts of fifty parliaments, and our cause owes more to Cicero and Seneca, to Vinet and Tocqueville, than to the laws of Lycurgus or the five codes of France.

John Dalberg-​Acton, 1st Baron Acton, “The History of Freedom in Antiquity,” published in Essays on Freedom and Power (1972)