Harold J. Laski

Where there is respect for reason, there, also, is respect for freedom.

And only respect for freedom can give final beauty to men’s lives.

If it pays to spread false news, let us be sure that false news will be spread.

If some special interest gains by corrupting the facts, so far as it can, the facts will be corrupted.

Our difficulty is the twofold one that propaganda can produce immense results in a brief space of time and that creative educational change takes something like a generation before its results are manifest upon a wide scale.

The forces at work to prevent the emergence of truth, the forces, also, which have every reason to dislike the development of the mind which seeks for truth, are many and concentrated and powerful.

They do not want the general reporting of experience, but only of that experience which favours themselves.

In our own day it would not be an unfair description of education to define it as the art which teaches men to be deceived by the printed word.

Those who profit by that deception are, at the moment, the masters of society.

We do not legislate for some conceivable Utopia to be born in some unimaginable time, but for the kind of world we know ourselves, for lives like our own lives.

Every postponement we accept, every failure before which we are dumb, only consolidates the forces that are hostile to freedom.

They have, in the past, fought every step on every road to freedom because they have seen that the accumulation of small concessions will, in the end, be their defeat.

Everywhere they have been guilty of definite error, or wrong, they have denied the error or wrong, lest it upset faith in their own right to power.

Not the least powerful to silence, you will recollect, which persuaded even those who thought Sacco and Vanzetti innocent was their fear that proof of that innocence might disturb popular faith in the Massachusetts Courts.

The will to freedom, like the will to power, is a habit, and it perishes of atrophy.

The inference I would draw is the quite basic one that in any society men only have an equal interest in freedom when they have an equal interest in its results.

Where those results are already possessed by some, they seldom have the imagination to see the consequence of their denial to others.

They will persuade themselves that those others are contented with their lot, or made differently in nature, so that they are unfit to enjoy what others possess.

There is no myth we are not capable of inventing to lull our conscience.

Life is so complex and tangled and full, that those who desire to abstain from the battle for freedom can always find ample excuse.

The workman may be afraid for his job; Babbitt may shrink from being shunned by the group whose fellowship is his life; it may be the handful of silver, the riband for the coat, the love of power, the loathing of what freedom may bring.

Whatever the motive of abstention, let us remember that men think differently who live differently, and that, as they think, so they build principles of action to remedy what, in their lives, they find bitter or unjust, to preserve what…

But the sense of bitterness or injustice that comes from bad housing, low wages, or the denial of an adequate political status, these we are able to remedy by social action.

The less we live in the experience of our neighbours, the less shall we feel wrong in the denial of their wants.

Trade unionists appreciate a demand for higher wages more keenly than employers: the wealthy rentier reads of a strike in the cotton trade as a newspaper incident, of a railway dispute, whatever its grounds, as a threat to the community.