Harold J. Laski: “Power is, by its very nature, an exercise in the conditional mood.”

The essence of the persecuting position is always that the persecutor has hold of truth and that he would betray its service by allowing it to be questioned.

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…

When attacks on liberty are political or economic, it is their motive rather than their nature that changes.

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.