They do not want the general population so trained as to prize truth, but only so trained that they believe whatever they read.

And if they are prepared to fight there is no room in the society for freedom since this is incompatible with habits of violence.

It will find it extraordinarily hard to organize supporters for its view, if this opposes the will of those in authority.

The remoteness means that the few will always fear the invasion of their privilege, and the many will envy them its possession.

They search for freedom for no other end but this.

The effort to transform a dull and corrupt autocracy into a quasi-constitutional system came, like the efforts of Louis XVI at reform, too late to affect men who had already passed beyond any possibility of compromise with the idea of…

But neither boldness nor severity can stem that tide.

The society is unbalanced because justice is not its habitation.

The same is true of matters like the treatment of racial minorities, of the scale of armaments, of the making of war and peace.

The use of reason is the law of liberty; conflict means the erosion of liberty.

If power is held by a few, happiness will be confined to a few also.

There is no other way to the attainment of that end; and an attitude, therefore, like that of Rousseau, who denied the legitimacy of any voluntary associations, fails altogether to take account of the elementary facts of social life.

Such bodies, indeed, must run in the leading-strings of principle, but the question of what that principle must be is not one the state alone is entitled to make.

For the latter is not justified in preventing the expression of desire; it is justified only in preventing the realization of desire by violent means.

It must tolerate the expression of experience it hates because it is there, as a state, to satisfy even the experience it cannot understand.

The Roman suppression of Christianity was built upon the belief that unity of religious belief is the necessary condition of citizenship; later experience shows that view to be without any substance.

What in fact emerges from the history of religious persecution is the lesson that the unity made by the suppression of Nonconformity is the unity of stagnation.

Any government which attacks a body organized to promote some set of opinions which may become dangerous to its safety may fairly be presumed to have something to conceal.

We must not, in fact, allow ourselves to fall into the error of believing that opinion which is antagonistic to the state-purpose is unworthy to survive.

The state-purpose, like any other, is expressed through the agency of men.

That is a power which could not safely be entrusted to any body of men who have ever operated as a government.

It is co-ordinating social life not to the end of its greater fullness, but simply for the sake of co-ordination.

But law, as I have insisted earlier, does not exist for the sake of law.

It is not entitled to obedience because it is legal, because, that is, it proceeds from a source of reference formally competent to enact it.

But we cannot understand the eighteenth century, or its theories, unless we realize that its temper was still dominantly aristocratic.