Harold J. Laski: “There are no governing principles in social life deliberately emerging from the interplay of its myriad constituent…”

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.

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.

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.

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…