Toleration Quotes

Clever men will recognize and tolerate nothing but cleverness; every authority rouses their ridicule, every superstition amuses them, every convention moves them to contradiction. Only force finds favor in their eyes, and they have no toleration for anything that is not purely natural and spontaneous. And yet ten clever men are not worth one man of talent, nor ten men of talent worth one man of genius. And in the individual, feeling is more than cleverness, reason is worth as much as feeling, and conscience has it over reason. If, then, the clever man is not mockable, he may at least be neither loved, nor considered, nor esteemed. He may make himself feared, it is true, and force others to respect his independence; but this negative advantage, which is the result of a negative superiority, brings no happiness with it. Cleverness is serviceable for everything, sufficient for nothing.

Henri-Frdric Amiel

This will to live was the first thing that Judaism gave to Christianity: hence that contradiction, which even today seems to many an inexplicable riddle, between a doctrine of inner conversion, toleration and mercifulness, and a religion of exclusive self-assertion and fanatical intolerance.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain

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

Toleration is the best religion.

Victor Hugo

Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none.

Edmund Burke

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

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.

Phillip Emmons Isaac Bonewits

The toleration of philosophy requires its being thought to serve powerful elements in society without actually becoming their servant.

Allan David Bloom