Time & Perspective Quote by E. M. Forster

Forster skewers a very particular kind of liberal self-regard: the version that loves “freedom” as a museum exhibit but panics when it starts living in the street. The sentence turns on a neat bit of personification. Freedom becomes “she,” not an abstract principle but a presence with agency - and, crucially, the capacity to irritate. Calling her a “nuisance” is the knife twist: it exposes how quickly lofty ideals get recast as inconvenient noise when they interfere with comfort, reputation, or national mood.

The real target is the alibi of uncertainty. “Amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee” names the evergreen rationale for repression: the future is hazy, therefore control feels responsible. Forster understands the emotional logic of censorship - not as villainy, but as nerves dressed up as prudence. “We get nervous” is devastatingly plain, almost domestic, reducing grand political backsliding to a familiar human reflex.

Context matters. Forster writes in a century when “emergency” became a governing style: world wars, propaganda regimes, the rise of mass media, and the habit of treating dissent as sabotage. He’s also pushing back against the respectable British tendency to prefer civility over conflict - to call controversy bad manners rather than democratic friction.

The intent isn’t simply to defend free speech as a principle; it’s to indict the sentimental way societies remember freedom. They celebrate it once it’s costless, then “admit censorship” the moment it demands risk, mess, or argument.