Harold J. Laski: “The opinion of Chief Justice Cockburn could not have made the issue more clear; it is a landmark in the judicial history…”

Liberty means self-government, and self-government means the right of every man to be his own legislator.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.

The theory of a state of nature, with the rights therein implied, is the contribution, through Stoicism, of the Roman lawyers, and the great medieval contrast to Aristotle's experimentalism.

The case for the view that freedom of thought and speech is a good in itself is fairly easy to make.