Harold J. Laski: “Nor is it, as Hobbes made it, the resignation of power into the hands of some single man or group.”

It has been the historic character of persecution always to degrade the persecutor and to strengthen the persecuted by drawing attention to their claims.

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

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…

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.