“The Stoics could only advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words, spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death, gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged; and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of freedom.”

—  John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)

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John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton 112
British politician and historian 1834–1902

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