Harold J. Laski: “We must not be led away by false claims to a special majesty born of its sovereign character to regard the state as…”

Yet such defects must not blind us to the general rightness of their insight.

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

Its eldest child is charity, and without it there can be no honesty of opinion.

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.