Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England (published in 1644—despite the title it wasn’t a speech). There Milton makes a rigorously logical and deeply impassioned plea for the freedom to express even the most outrageous political ideas—for, the poet argued, when “books freely permitted are,” this freedom conduces “both to the trial of virtue and the exercise of truth.” It is surely “more wholesome, more prudent, and more Christian that many be tolerated, rather than all compelled.”
