Quotes About Tolerance

Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's try to work it out.

I am a liberal, and liberalism is the politics of kindness. Liberals stand for tolerance, magnanimity, community spirit, the defense of the weak against the powerful, love of learning, freedom of belief, art and poetry, city life, the very things that make America worth dying for.50

It's people who don't think who sink into bigotry.

but some people don't care as much about pain. They know it, they're used to it; it may not be an old friend, but it is an old companion.

People should be allowed to believe what they want to believe. If some of us have seen things that make us question the limits of the world and the possibilities of a larger world, then that's on us. It's ours to consider. To fear or not to fear as we each choose.

A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will.

Minorities are always better off in a culture which protects dissent than in a culture which protects us from dissent.

Intergroup animosity need not be about anything,

IT IS VERY difficult for an ordinary heterosexual to imagine that an ordinary homosexual is in fact not, deep inside, a repressed heterosexual who needs to try harder with women or just get his act together.

We from every religion feel comfortable in Britain because there is a host. The Church of England is a good host, it has been a major force in shaping England into such a tolerant society.

Recall that even the liberal-minded John Locke in the seventeenth century argued against granting civil rights to atheists: '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 on an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all.'6 This is not to endorse these sentiments, merely to note that they exist.

God hates hatred between people, and Scripture reckons it as equal to idolatry, forbidden sex, and bloodshed combined.

The test of faith is whether I can make space for difference. Can I recognize God's image in someone who is not in my image [...]? If I cannot, then I have made God in my image instead of allowing him to remake me in his.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand. Not only do most religions not do this.

At three in the morning we finished by dancing together. We knew we were different, we knew that there were deep divides between our respective faiths, but we had become friends. Perhaps that is all we should seek. Friends do not have to agree in order to stay friends. And friendships can sometimes help heal the world.

A number of recent scholars have suggested that the answer lies in the abandonment of the ethics of identity altogether in favour of cosmopolitanism, a world without community.4 But no cosmopolitan society is as tolerant as it seems. In antiquity, both the Greeks and Romans attempted at one time or another to eliminate the practice of Judaism. Europe of the Enlightenment did not end anti-Semitism: it gave rise to a new and violent strain of it.

Oh, we'll suffer in silence. You've given us plenty of practice at that.

We have just religion enough to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

I hate nobody: I am in charity with all the world.

We have enough religion to hate each other, but not enough to love each other.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love on another.

We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Pity, I've learned, is like a fart. You can tolerate your own, but you simply can't stand anyone else's.