Harold J. Laski: “Every social order is ardently upheld by fanatics who are eager to make dissent from their view a crime.”

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.

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

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.