Quotes & Sayings About Toleration

Decency and tolerance, to be of any value, must be capable of withstanding the severest strain. — Mahatma Gandhi

In a world in which the personal is widely believed to be the political, the sheep of toleration soon turns into the wolf that demands acceptance, indeed, admiration. — Kenneth Minogue

It is the darling delusion of mankind that the world is progressive in religion, toleration, freedom, as it is progressive in machinery. — Moncure D. Conway

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art. — Wallace Stevens

So a law was made that any Christian might worship as he saw fit. This was the first toleration act in the history of America. It was the first toleration act in the history of modern times. — Edward Channing

Loyalty in a free society depends upon the toleration of disloyalty. — Alan Barth

The highest creed is Universal Acceptance. — Abhijit Naskar

Real knowledge never promoted either turbulence or unbelief; but its progress is the forerunner of liberality and enlightened toleration. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

Toleration made the world anti-Christian. — John Cotton

It is only the forcible propagation of conventional Christianity that makes the agnostic so bitter toward the church. He knows that all the doctrines cannot possibly be true, but he would view them with toleration if he were asked merely to let them alone for the benefit of the masses whom they can help and succour. — H.P. Lovecraft

Toleration of people who differ in convictions and habits requires a residual awareness of the complexity of truth and the possibility of opposing view having some light on one or the other facet of a many-sided truth. — Reinhold Niebuhr

I have read that the secret of gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites, the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of toleration, and his own doings with a smile of honest amusement, and Heaven with a smile which is not distrustful - being thoroughly persuaded that God is kindlier than the genteel would regard as rational. — James Branch Cabell

Modern toleration is really a tyranny. It is a tyranny because it is a silence. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Every church, yea, every truth and every good cause, has its martyrs, who stood the fiery trial and sacrificed comfort and life itself to their sacred convictions. The blood of martyrs is the seed of toleration; toleration is the seed of liberty; and liberty is the most precious gift of God to every man who has been made in his image and redeemed by Christ. — Philip Schaff

The kind of self-righteous intolerance once associated with the more puritanical forms of religion and the more extreme forms of Socialism now reappeared to promote the 'rights' of women, homosexuals, racial minorities, the disabled and any group of people who could be portrayed as being 'below the line' and therefore discriminated against...Unconsciously they were using the belief that they were acting in the name of selfless moral principle simply as a cloak for asserting their ego, and as a means to enjoy feelings of moral superiority. In the cause of 'toleration' and promoting collective 'rights,' they had become possessed by a fanatical and humorless intolerance. — Christopher Booker

In this world there is only toleration for the so-called normal. — Radclyffe Hall

I am a Hindu, I am proud to belong to a religion which has taught the world both tolerance and universal acceptance. We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. — Swami Vivekananda

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly dishonest. — Newt Gingrich

Indulgence is lovely in the sinless; toleration, adorable in the pious and believing heart. — Sophie Swetchine

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness. — J. Budziszewski

Multiculturalism is social poison. Toleration of intolerance isn't sophistication. It's suicide. — Jack Kelly

when John Locke published his celebrated Letters concerning toleration in the aftermath of England's Glorious Revolution, he still excluded Roman Catholics and atheists from his proposals, on the grounds that they were enemies to the English state. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

We must win the common people in every corner. This will be obtained chiefly by means of the schools, and by open, hearty behavior, show, condescension, popularity, and toleration of their prejudices, which we shall at leisure root out and dispel. — Adam Weishaupt

The danger is one which democracy by itself does not suffice to avert. A democracy in which the majority exercises its power without restraint may be almost as tyrannical as a dictatorship. Toleration of minorities is an essential part of wise democracy, but a part which is not always sufficiently remembered. — Bertrand Russell

The golden rule of conduct is mutual toleration, seeing that we will never all think alike and we shall always see Truth in fragment and from different points of vision. — Mahatma Gandhi

We need justice. We need toleration, honesty and moral courage. These are modern virtues without which we cannot hope to control the forces science has let loose among us. — I. A. R. Wylie

Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion. — John Locke

I say, if you hate cruelty, remember that nothing is so cruel in its consequences as the toleration of heresy! — George Bernard Shaw

Thanks to the toleration preached by the encyclopedists of the eighteenth century, the sorcerer is exempt from torture. — Honore De Balzac

In our country we ask no toleration for religion and its free exercise, but we claim it as an inalienable right. — Philip Schaff

Every sect clamors for toleration when it is down. — Thomas B. Macaulay

My hate is general, I detest all men;
Some because they are wicked and do evil,
Others because they tolerate the wicked,
Refusing them the active vigorous scorn
Which vice should stimulate in virtuous minds. — Moliere

The end of toleration in 1685 left a legacy of bitterness and instability in France, for it failed to destroy the Huguenots, while encouraging an arrogance and exclusiveness within the established Catholic Church. In the great French. Revolution after 1789 this divide was one of the forces encouraging the extraordinary degree of revulsion against Catholic Church institutions, clergy and religious that produced the atrocities of the 1790s; beyond that it created the anticlericalism which has been so characteristic of the left in the politics of modern southern Europe. In the history of modern France, it is striking how the areas in the south that after 1572 formed the Protestant heartlands continued to form the backbone of anti-clerical, anti-monarchical voters for successive Republics, and even in the late twentieth century they were still delivering a reliable vote for French Socialism. — Diarmaid MacCulloch

All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State. — Edwin A. Abbott

What the State can usefully do is to make itself a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own. — John Stuart Mill

Toleration and liberty are the foundations of a great republic. — Frank Lloyd Wright

I really cannot tolerate people who always find excuses or reasons why certain things won't work. Find reasons and solutions to make it work. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

We who claim toleration should be the first to extend it to others. I — Arthur Conan Doyle

We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [ ... ] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. — George Bernard Shaw

A husband and wife ought to continue united so long as they love each other. Any law which should bind them to cohabitation for one moment after the decay of their affection would be a most intolerable tyranny, and the most unworthy of toleration. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

Once again, the point of this discussion is not to accuse Christians of endorsing torture and persecution. Of course most devout Christians today are thoroughly tolerant and humane people. Even those who thunder from televised pulpits do not call for burning heretics alive or hoisting Jews on the strappado. The question is why they don't, given that their beliefs imply that it would serve the greater good. The answer is that people in the West today compartmentalize their religious ideology. When they affirm their faith in houses of worship, they profess beliefs that have barely changed in two thousand years. But when it comes to their actions, they respect modern norms of nonviolence and toleration, a benevolent hypocrisy for which we should all be grateful. — Steven Pinker

What a most unreasonably stubborn man," he said. "One must be more open to opposing views in this world."
"You don't say."
"Oh, indeed! As our late father often said, 'Toleration is good for all or it is good for non. — Daniel Stashower

Christians have oppressed Jews, Moslems, Buddhists, Pagans, and each other throughout their centuries of power, preaching religious intolerance as the word of Jehovah whenever they had the military, political, or economic power to make it stick - and then piously preaching brotherhood, peace, and toleration when they didn't. — Isaac Bonewits

The true man of God is heartsick, grieved at the worldliness of the Church, grieved at the toleration of sin in the Church, grieved at the prayerlessness in the Church. He is disturbed that the corporate prayer of the Church no longer pulls down the strongholds of the devil. — Leonard Ravenhill

How could, it was felt, people be so opposed to modernity, and all the many goods it had to offer to people around the world: equality, liberty, prosperity, toleration, pluralism and representative government. — Pankaj Mishra

Toleration is the best religion. — Victor Hugo

What is tolerance? It is a necessary consequence of humanity. We are all fallible, let us then pardon each other's follies. This is the first principle of natural right. — Voltaire

The doctrine of Necessity or Destiny is the doctrine of Toleration. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fortunately we have learnt to combine these ideas, not in the mutual toleration of sub-contraries, but in the affirmation of contraries, that transcending of the laws of intellect which is madness in the ordinary man, genius in the Overman who hath arrived to strike off more fetters from our understanding. — Aleister Crowley

The mere toleration of the slave trade could not make slavery itself - the right of property in man - lawful any where; not even on board the slave ship. Toleration of a wrong is not law. — Lysander Spooner

The opinions which are still persecuted strike the majority as so monstrous and immoral that the general principle of toleration cannot be held to apply to them. But this is exactly the same view as that which made possible the tortures of the Inquisition. — Bertrand Russell

It is a sore thing to have laboured along and scaled the arduous hilltops, and when all is done, find humanity indifferent to your achievement. Hence physicists condemn the unphysical; financiers have only a superficial toleration for those who know little of stocks; literary persons despise the unlettered; and people of all pursuits combine to disparage those who have none.
But though this is one difficulty of the subject, it is not the greatest. You could not be put in prison for speaking against industry, but you can be sent to Coventry for speaking like a fool. The greatest difficulty with most subjects is to do them well; therefore, please to remember this is an apology. It is certain that much may be judiciously argued in favour of diligence; only there is something to be said against it, and that is what, on the present occasion, I have to say. — Robert Louis Stevenson

Persecution always says, 'I know the consequences of your opinion better than you know them yourselves.' But the language of toleration was always amicable, liberal, and just: it confessed its doubts, and acknowledged its ignorance ... Persecution had always reasoned from cause to effect, from opinion to action, [that such an opinion would invariably lead to but one action], which proved generally erroneous; while toleration led us invariably to form just conclusions, by judging from actions and not from opinions. — Charles James Fox

Toleration ought in reality to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to affront. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Religious toleration, to a certain extent, has been won, because people have ceased to consider religion so important as it was once thought to be. But in politics and economics, which have taken the place formerly occupied by religion, there is a growing tendency to persecution, which is not by any means confined to one party. — Bertrand Russell

Surprisingly one of the forces for secularisation was Christianity itself. As soon as it accepted the idea of a contrary opinion, the moment that European opinion decided for toleration, it decided for eventual free marketing opinion. — Ibn Warraq

The fact is that secularists are "for" reason and science only to the extent that they don't lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. Again, the animus against religion is not merely a feature of the secularist mindset; it is the only feature. — Edward Feser

Toleration, holding that every other man has the same right to his opinion and faith that we have to ours; and liberality, holding that as no human being can with certainty say, in the clash and conflict of hostile faiths and creeds, what is truth, or that he is surely in possession of it, so everyone should feel that it is quite possible that another equally honest and sincere with himself, and yet holding the contrary opinion, may himself be in possession of the truth. — Albert Pike

It is not just that secularists happen to reject and oppose religion; it's that there is nothing more to their creed than rejecting and opposing religion ... The fact is that secularists are "for" reason and science only to the extent that they don't lead to religious conclusions; they celebrate free choice only insofar as one chooses against traditional or religiously oriented morality; and they are for democracy and toleration only to the extent that these might lead to a less religiously oriented social and political order. — Edward Feser

The herd instinct of the mob was not yet as offensively powerful in public life as it is today; freedom in what you did or did not do in private life was taken for granted - which is hardly imaginable now - and toleration was not, as it is today, deplored as a weakness and debility, but was praised as an ethical force. — Stefan Zweig

And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. The superstition of the people was not embittered theological rancor. — Edward Gibbon

Those who love others
grandly are those who love themselves grandly. Those who have a high
toleration and acceptance of others are those who have a high
toleration and acceptance of themselves. You cannot show another a part
of you that you cannot show yourself. Therefore, begin where all
growth, where all evolution, where all love must begin; with the person
in the mirror. — Neale Donald Walsch

Our contention is not for mere toleration, but for absolute liberty. There is a wide difference between toleration and liberty. Toleration implies that somebody falsely claims the right to tolerate. Toleration is a concession, while liberty is a right. Toleration is a matter of expediency, while liberty is a matter of principle. — George W Truett

One of the most corrosive aspects of the criminal justice system is its toleration of the insanity defense...Legitimate in some few cases, the insanity defense has been rendered farcical through its manipulation by so-called experts. — Robert K. Tanenbaum

As [William] Valentiner noted in his uncompleted memoirs Remembering Artists, [Diego] Rivera's [Detroit Industry] murals rooted the Detroit Institute of Arts to the many-faceted jewel of its central court because of the harmonious, fertile relationship between "the industrialist" and "the artist." Rivera remarked to Valentiner how especially struck he was that "Edsel had none of the characteristics of the exploiting capitalist, that he had the simplicity and directness of a workman in his won factories and was like one of the best of them." Their relationship was like the murals themselves, a superb expression of pluralism, toleration, and empathy for the other, and of a cosmopolitan sense of all the Americas, not just of the United States of America or Detroit alone. — John Dean

Locke's essay on Toleration of 1689 argued for the toleration of opinions and ways of life with which you do not agree, as one of the virtues of a liberal society. But many who call themselves liberal today seem to have little understanding of what this virtue really is. Toleration does not mean renouncing all opinions that others might find offensive. It does not mean an easy-going relativism or a belief that 'anything goes'. On the contrary, it means accepting the right of others to think and act in ways of which you disapprove. It means being prepared to protect people from negative discrimination even when you hate what they think and what they feel. But — Roger Scruton

Toleration and freedom and fairness are values too, and they can hardly be defended by the claim that no values can be defended. So it is a mistake to affirm ... that all values are merely subjective. — Michael J. Sandel

Friendship is a Spackle in itself. You'll forgive your friends a lot, and if you're a woman, you'll forgive your straight male friends even more. They represent the possibility of mutual toleration between the sexes, a keyhole into the mind of the Other, and the promise of one day meeting someone just like them except that you want to sleep with them. — Sloane Crosley

The significant contribution of empiricism was not the eradication of certainty, but the eradication of infallibility as a criterion of certainty. And this shift from infallibilism to fallibilism has profound consequences not only for toleration, but also for the subordination of faith to reason and theology to philosophy. — George H. Smith

I am driven into grudging toleration of the Conservative party because it is the party of nonpolitics, of resistance to politics. I have seen how many of the evils of life - failure, loneliness, fear, boredom, inability to communicate - are ineradicable by political means, and that attempts so to eradicate them are disastrous. — Kingsley Amis

I do not like the reappearance of the Jesuits ... Shall we not have regular swarms of them here, in as many disguises as only a king of the gipsies can assume, dressed as printers, publishers, writers and schoolmasters? If ever there was a body of men who merited damnation on earth and in Hell, it is this society of Loyola's. Nevertheless, we are compelled by our system of religious toleration to offer them an asylum. — John Adams

Toleration is the greatest gift of the mind; it requires the same effort of the brain that it takes to balance oneself on a bicycle. — Helen Keller

A tolerant society is one in which we criminalise an activity only as a last resort. Toleration is not just about allowing people to do things of which we approve, but about allowing them to do things of which we do not approve. — John Gummer

No evil can result from its inhibition more pernicious than its toleration. — Martin Van Buren

To realize the Enlightenment ideals of formal equality, the rule of law, freedom of commerce, and religious toleration, Voltaire and many of the other philosophes looked to absolutist monarchs, whose policies they hoped to influence. The support of the philosophes for the expansion of the monarch's sovereign power was tactical. It arose not out of a principled belief in the throne, but out of the recognition that only a strong monarchy had the power to override the resistance to enlightened legislation by the privileged churches, estates, and corporations that made up continental European society. (p. 45) — Jerry Z. Muller

Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all; besides also, those that by their atheism undermine and destroy all religion, can have no pretence of religion whereupon to challenge the privilege of a toleration. As for other practical opinions, though not absolutely free from all error, if they do not tend to establish domination over others, or civil impunity to the Church in which they are taught, there can be no reason why they should not be tolerated. — John Locke

Whereas each man claims his freedom as a matter of right, the freedom he accords to other men is a matter of toleration. — Walter Lippmann

Whatever work you undertake, do it seriously, thoroughly and well; never leave it half-done or undone, never feel yourself satisfied unless and until you have given it your very best. Cultivate the habits of discipline and toleration. Surrender not the convictions you hold dear but learn to appreciate the points of view of your opponents. — Syama Prasad Mukherjee

I can say it, but it doesn't seem convincing to most people. I can call it an 'injustice,' but that doesn't always sink in either. You have to understand the nature of the culture in New York. Words that are equal to the pain of the poor are pretty easily discredited. A quarter of the truth, stated with lots of indirection, is regarded as more seemly.

Even when people do accept the idea of 'injustice,' there are ways to live with it without it causing you to change a great deal in your life. A mildly embarrassed toleration of injustice is an elemental part of cultural sophistication here. the stile is, 'Oh yes. We know all that. So tell us something new.' There's a kind of cultivated weariness in this. Talking about injustice, I am told, is 'tiresome' unless you do it in a way that sounds amusing. — Jonathan Kozol

According to the maxims of universal toleration, the Romans protected a superstition which they despised. — Edward Gibbon

Fabulous. Toleration is the key word. It's a pity few people understand this. — Cristiane Serruya

The policy of the emperors and the senate, as far as it concerned religion, was happily seconded by the reflections of the enlightened, and by the habits of the superstitious, part of their subjects. The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. — Edward Gibbon

The fundamental precept of liberty is toleration. — Calvin Coolidge

The grateful applause of the clergy has consecrated the memory of a prince, who indulged their passions and promoted their interest. Constantine gave them security, wealth, honours, and revenge; and the support of the orthodox faith was considered as the most sacred and important duty of the civil magistrate. The edict of Milan, the great charter of toleration, had confirmed to each individual of the Roman world the privilege of choosing and professing his own religion. — Edward Gibbon

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians. — George Bernard Shaw

Many Americans and Western Europeans proudly trumpet the diversity of cosmopolises like London and New York without realizing that cosmopolitanism does not mean people of different skin colors all sitting around over wine at a bistro table complaining about organized religion. It means people who hold profoundly different, even mutually exclusive, beliefs and cultural norms functioning in a shared space based on toleration of disagreement. — Jonathan A.C. Brown

I had no idea, however, that in Pennsylvania, the cradle of toleration and freedom of religion, it [fanaticism] could have arisen to the height you describe. This must be owing to the growth of Presbyterianism. The blasphemy of the five points of Calvin, and the impossibility of defending them, render their advocates impatient of reasoning, irritable, and prone to denunciation. — Thomas Jefferson

Toleration means being prepared to accept opinions that you intensely dislike. Likewise democracy means consenting to be governed by people whom you intensely dislike. This — Roger Scruton

Toleration is not the opposite of intolerance, but is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, the other of granting it. — James Madison

One characteristic of Americans is that they have no toleration at all of anybody putting up with anything. We believe that whatever is going wrong ought to be fixed. — Margaret Mead

Lenin held that religion was a simply product of social oppression and economic exploitation. 'The social oppression of toiling masses, their apparent complete helplessness before the blind forces of capitalism ... that is the deepest contemporary root of religion'. Theoretically it followed from this that the elimination of social and economic evils should lead to the disappearance of religious belief. In practice, however, the party has never shown any confidence that this would happen: it has not felt able to concede the churches toleration, and let them decline of their own accord. On the contrary, from the beginning it has aimed at the destruction of the churches and the forcible secularization of believers. With the exemption of the years 1941-53, that has remained the case ever since. — Geoffrey Hosking

The idolatry of food cuts across class lines. This can be seen in the public's toleration of a level of cruelty in meat production that it would tolerate nowhere else. If someone inflicts pain on an animal for visual, aural, or sexual gratification, we consider him a monster, and the law makes at least a token effort at punishment. If someone's goal is to put the "product" in his mouth? ... — Brian Reynolds Myers

Had this author [Sir W Drummond Academical Questions, chap. iii.], instead of inveighing against the guilt and absurdity of atheism, demonstrated its falsehood, his conduct would have, been more suited to the modesty of the skeptic and the toleration of the philosopher. — Percy Bysshe Shelley

If there was no other proof of the infinite patience of God, a very good one could be found in His toleration of the pictures that are painted of Him. — Thomas Merton

We must keep on trying to solve problems, one by one, stage by stage, if not on the basis of confidence and cooperation, at least on that of mutual toleration and self-interest. — Lester B. Pearson

For though to let loose the bridle to lusts, while our opinions are against such things, is bad; yet, to sin, and plead a toleration so to do, is worse. The one stumbles beholders accidentally, the other pleads them into the snare. — Bunyan, John

Advocating the mere tolerance of difference between women is the grossest reformism. it is a total denial of the creative function of difference in our lives. Difference must be not merely toleration, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. Only then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening. Only within the interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters — Audre Lorde

Thus Turks and Christians are of different religions, because these take the Holy Scriptures to be the rule of their religion, and those the Alcoran. And for the same reason there may be different religions also even amongst Christians. The Papists and Lutherans, though both of them profess faith in Christ and are therefore called Christians, yet are not both of the same religion, because these acknowledge nothing but the Holy Scriptures to be the rule and foundation of their religion, those take in also traditions and the decrees of Popes and of these together make the rule of their religion; and thus the Christians of St. John (as they are called) and the Christians of Geneva are of different religions, because these also take only the Scriptures, and those I know not what traditions, for the rule of their religion. — John Locke

Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable. — George Bernard Shaw

The Catholics of Maryland were the first people on the new continent to declare universal religious toleration. Let this be remembered to their eternal honor. — Robert Green Ingersoll