Harold J. Laski: “The powers of the people thus became their rights and herein was an unlimited sanction for innovation.”

It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims.

Each age finds that the incidence of freedom is significant at some special point, and there, once more, the lesson of freedom has to be learned.

Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order.

The intolerance may be Catholic, when it insists that a unity of outlook is essential for the preservation of society; or it may be Protestant when, as with Calvin and the Socinians, it holds that the blasphemous nature of the belief…