Harold J. Laski: “Wilkes was a sign that the populace was slowly awaking to a sense of its own power.”

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…

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.