FEAR AND REPRESSION OF THOUGHT

Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, translated from the French by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis, glossary and notes by Richard Greeman, and with a foreword by Adam Hochschild (New York New York Review Books, 1951, 2012) ("The relationship between error and true understanding are in any case too abstruse for anyone to presume to regulate them with any authority. Men have no choice but to make long detours through hypotheses, mistakes, and imaginative guesses, if they are to succeed in extricating assessments which are more exact, if partly provisional: for there are few cases of complete exactness. This means that freedom of thought seems to me, of all values, one of the most essential." "It is also the most contested. Everywhere and at every time, I have encountered fear of thought, repression of thought, an almost universal desire to escape or else stifle this ferment of restlessness." Id. at 441.).