I may as well pause here to explain their error. The right to know
is like the right to live. It is fundamental and unconditional in its
assumption that knowledge, like life, is a desirable thing, though any
fool can prove that ignorance is bliss, and that "a little knowledge is
a dangerous thing" (a little being the most that any of us can attain),
as easily as that the pains of life are more numerous and constant than
its pleasures, and that therefore we should all be better dead. The
logic is unimpeachable; but its only effect is to make us say that if
these are the conclusions logic leads to, so much the worse for logic,
after which curt dismissal of Folly, we continue living and learning by
instinct: that is, as of right. We legislate on the assumption that no
man may be killed on the strength of a demonstration that he would be
happier in his grave, not even if he is dying slowly of cancer and
begs the doctor to despatch him quickly and mercifully. To get killed
lawfully he must violate somebody else's right to live by committing
murder. But he is by no means free to live unconditionally. In society
he can exercise his right to live only under very stiff conditions. In
countries where there is compulsory military service he may even have to
throw away his individual life to save the life of the community.
It is just so in the case of the right to knowledge. It is a right that
is as yet very imperfectly recognized in practice. But in theory it
is admitted that an adult person in pursuit of knowledge must not be
refused it on the ground that he would be better or happier without
it. Parents and priests may forbid knowledge to those who accept their
authority; and social taboo may be made effective by acts of legal
persecution under cover of repressing blasphemy, obscenity, and
sedition; but no government now openly forbids its subjects to pursue
knowledge on the ground that knowledge is in itself a bad thing, or that
it is possible for any of us to have too much of it.