Harold J. Laski

To shelter him at every point from experience which, if carried to excess, may harm him is not only impossible, but also dangerous.

I believe, first, that it is socially most important to leave the individual as uninhibited as possible in forming his own way of life, granted, of course, that he is adult and mature.

There is a clear case for insisting that persons, even if they be passionate Christian Scientists, who are suffering from an infectious disease like small-pox, shall be isolated until they are cured; for anyone who goes about with…

There is a clear case for forbidding the sale of noxious drugs like heroin or cocaine except under severe restrictions, because it is clear that in themselves their consumption is bound to harm the recipient.

It would be impossible to forbid the use of cheques because some people succumb to the habit of embezzlement.

Men are made not by being safeguarded against temptation but by being able to triumph over it.

We have to remember that it always runs the risk of undermining character by a limitation of responsibility.

False social standards result from our excessive adulation of film-stars and athletes; but we should obviously be merely foolish if we legislated against the publicity which makes for that excessive adulation.

Many motorists sacrifice their lives to their motor-car, especially in America; but no one would propose legislation against an undue indulgence in motoring.

Over-eating does great harm, but no one would propose legislation against over-eating.

In most cases, we have to leave the individual free to judge at what point excess is a fact.

For we cannot suppress all modes of conduct in which excess does harm.

Conduct must be punished or prohibited when it is harmful in itself or in the excess in which it touches society before we ought to seek access to the clumsy machinery of the law.

I am prepared, for example, to make it illegal to keep a gaming-house; but I am not prepared to legislate against a social game of bridge played for money in a private house.

Neither the fact that a mode of conduct may be harmful in excess, nor the fact that, whether harmful or no, society dislikes it, seems to me in itself a just ground for its suppression by the law.

I do not find it easy to accept any single principle that is obvious and straightforward as applicable to the very complex problems we encounter in this realm.

No one is harmed, for instance, by a moderate indulgence in alcoholic liquor; but since drunkenness is harmful both to the individual and society, the state, it is said, is justified in prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic…

It is therefore assumed by many that it is the business of the state actively to discourage such conduct, even to the point, if necessary, of making its most innocuous expression illegal.

Force is never a reply to argument; and until argument itself seeks force as the expression of its principle, it is only by argument that it can justifiably be countered.

Since bodies like the Communist Party are in fact an announcement that some lives at least are shaped inadequately by the laws of a régime like our own, suppression seems to me an indefensible way of meeting that announcement.

Law exists for what it does; and its rightness is made by the attitude adopted to it by those whose lives it proposes to shape.

It is not entitled to obedience because it is legal, because, that is, it proceeds from a source of reference formally competent to enact it.

But law, as I have insisted earlier, does not exist for the sake of law.

It is co-ordinating social life not to the end of its greater fullness, but simply for the sake of co-ordination.

Any government which attacks a body organized to promote some set of opinions which may become dangerous to its safety may fairly be presumed to have something to conceal.