Harold J. Laski: “What interested him was the idea of the English State; and whatever, as he thought, deformed it, was not of the essence…”

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.

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

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

There are realms of conduct within which, to be free, I must be permitted to act as I please; to be denied self-expression there, is to be denied freedom.