Harold J. Laski: “Therein we have a sense, less clear in any previous writer save Machiavelli, of the real result of the decay of medieval…”

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

If no such news is at hand it will be manufactured.

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

From no accusation were its statesmen more anxious to be free than from that of a belief in democratic government.