Harold J. Laski: “They rush to the legislature to compel action every time they discover some exceptional incident of dubious conduct.”

Each age makes some idol in its own image and sacrifices upon its altar the freedom of those who refuse it worship.

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 only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies.

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…