Harold J. Laski: “Here Rousseau had a message for Great Britain which Burke at every stage denied.”

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 only way to deal with novelty is to understand it, and the only way to deal with grievance is to seek a remedy for the complaint it embodies.

We grant toleration in one part of the field only to deny it in another.

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…