They point to needs which are seeking satisfaction, and the society gains nothing by prohibiting their expression.
Harold J. Laski
The Public Record
Harold Joseph Laski was an English political theorist and economist. He was active in politics and served as the chairman of the British Labour Party from 1945 to 1946 and was a professor at the London School of Economics from 1926 to 1950. He first promoted pluralism by emphasising the importance of local voluntary communities such as trade unions. After 1930, he began to emphasize the need for a workers' revolution, which he hinted might be violent. Laski's position angered Labour leaders who promised a nonviolent democratic transformation. Laski's position on democracy-threatening violence came under further attack from Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the 1945 UK general election, and the Labour Party had to disavow Laski, its own chairman.
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For no one really ceases to be a revolutionary Communist or a passionate Roman Catholic by being forbidden to be either of these.
His conviction that society is rotten at its base is only the more ardently held, his search for alternative ways of expressing his conviction becomes only the more feverish as a result of suppression.
When the United States Customs Department suppressed Candide on the ground that it was an obscene book, they merely stimulated the perverse curiosity of thousands to whom Candide would have remained less than a name.
When the British Government prosecuted the Communists for sedition in 1925 the daily reports of the trial, the editorial discussion of its result, made the principles of Communism known to innumerable readers who would never, under other…
No state can suppress the human impulse of curiosity, and there is always a special delight, a kind of psychological scarcity-value, in knowledge of the forbidden.
No technique of suppression has so far been discovered which does not have the effect of giving wider currency to the thing suppressed than can be attained in any other fashion.
The heresies we may suppress today are the orthodoxies of tomorrow.
New truth begins always in a minority of one; it must be someone’s perception before it becomes a general perception.
The world gains nothing from a refusal to entertain the possibility that a new idea may be true.
It would, indeed, be hardly beyond the mark to affirm that a list of the opinions condemned as wrong or dangerous would be a list of the commonplaces of our time.
Most people can see that Nero and Diocletian accomplished nothing by their persecution of Christianity.
Upon what grounds can we infer prospective gain from persecution of opinion?
If the view held is untrue, experience shows that conviction of its untruth is invariably a matter of time; it does not come because authority announces that it is untrue.
If the view is true in part only, the separation of truth and falsehood is accomplished most successfully in a free intellectual competition, a process of dissociation by rational criticism, in which those who hold the false opinion are…
If, again, the view held is wholly true, nothing whatever is gained by preventing its expression.
A mere zeal for the well-being of society is an utterly inadequate qualification; for most persons who have played the part of censor have possessed this and have yet been utterly unfit for their task.
The self-appointed person, Mr Comstock, for instance, merely identifies his private view of moral right with the ultimate principles of ethics; and only the intellectually blind would ask that the citizen be fitted to his vicious bed of…
The official censor, a man like the famous Pobedonostev, normally assumes that any thorough criticism of the existing social order is dangerous and destructive; and, thereby, he transforms what might be creative demand into secret attack…
I, certainly, am not prepared, on a priori grounds, to say that a lawyer, however well-trained in the law, has a better sense of what is likely to produce moral depravity than Mr Bennett or Mr Shaw; and a reading of Miss Hall’s dull and…
Yet I observe that some of the most eminent American critics have praised it as the finest example of a novel seeking the truth about the sexual relations of men and women that an Englishman has published in the twentieth century.
My point is that in a choice, say, between the average police magistrate and Mr Robert Morss Lovett, I am not prepared to accept the former’s opinion of what I may be safely left to read.
Let me remind you, moreover, of what cannot too often be pointed out, that the rigorous application of the legal tests of obscenity would prohibit the circulation of a very considerable part of the great literature of the world.
The Bible, Shakespeare, Rabelais, Plato, Horace, Catullus, to take names at random, would all come under the ban.
But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.
Politicians like Harold J. Laski
