John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton Quote

It was from America that the plain ideas that men ought to mind their business, and that the nation is responsible to Heaven for the acts of the State — ideas long locked in the breast of solitary thinkers, and hidden among Latin folios— burst forth like a conqueror upon the world they were destined to transform, under the title of the Rights of Man … and the principle gained ground, that a nation can never abandon its fate to an authority it cannot control.

The History of Freedom in Antiquity (1877)