When liberty’s position is challenged, artists and writers are the ones who first take up the sword. They do so without persuasion, for the battle is peculiarly their own. In the nature of things, a person engaged in the flimsy business of expressing himself on paper is dependent on the large general privilege of being heard. Any intimation that this privilege may be revoked throws a writer into a panic. His is a double allegiance to freedom — an intellectual one springing from the conviction that pure thought has a right to function unimpeded, and a selfish one springing from his need, as a breadwinner, to be allowed to speak his piece.

E. B. White (1899-1985) American author, critic, humorist [Elwyn Brooks White]

Essay (1939-01), “One Man’s Meat,” Harper’s Magazine, Vol. 178
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When collected in his book, One Man's Meat (1944), the essay was renamed "Salt Water Farm." Sometimes the excerpted third section of the essay is referred to as "The Duty of Writers."