Harold J. Laski: “The case for the view that freedom of thought and speech is a good in itself is fairly easy to make.”

Ultimately, that denial is always made upon the same ground: it is insisted that the doctrines or practices attacked are subversive of the civil order.

We grant it in religion to deny it in politics; we grant it in politics, to deny it in economic matters.

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.