Quotes About Tolerance

but you don't need to understand everything about a world to live in it.

familiarity breeds acceptance.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man—the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reasons. —Abraham J. Heschel, rabbi and philosopher (1907–72)

Live and let live

He is a good man, and I don't like Thomas More and his band of heretic hunters. A man should have a right to believe what a man wants to believe. (p. 337)

Just because you can't understand me, doesn't mean I can't understand you

when you were young and your heart was an open book you used to say live and let live.

It moved me away from the narcissism of childhood and into the world's mysteries—the unexplained, the taboo, the other—and drew me closer to a place of understanding and acceptance.

just cool it with the anti-semitic remarks.

the sweet and smiley and sexually unthreatening elf with liberal values and a positive attitude is supposed to transform everyone into noble gay-loving protectors—again, as long as the gay in question toes the party line, isn't messy or too sexual, negative or angry and offers no contradictions and is certainly not conservative or Christian.

Sometimes, when listening to friends of mine, I'd stare at them while a tiny voice in the back of my head started sighing, You are the biggest fucking baby I've ever fucking heard in my entire fucking life and please you've got to fucking calm the fuck down—I get it, I get it, you don't like fucking Trump but for fuck's sake enough already for fuck's sake.

But if you look at everything only through the lens of your party or affiliation, and are capable of being in the same room only with people who think and vote like you, doesn't that make you somewhat uncurious and oversimplifying, passive-aggressive, locked into assuming you are riding the high moral tide, without ever wondering if you might not, in the eyes of others, be on the very bottom?

Not being able or willing to put yourself in someone else's shoes—to view life differently from how you yourself experience it—is the first step toward being not empathic, and this is why so many progressive movements become as rigid and as authoritarian as the institutions they're resisting.

It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.

Because I follow Jesus, then, I am bound to Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, agnostics, atheists, New Agers, everyone (even religious broadcasters, I was just reminded by a still, small voice). Not only am I bound to them in love, but I am also actually called to, in some real sense (please don't minimize this before you qualify it), become one of them, to enter their world and be with them in it.

The wise preacher of Ecclesiastes might say, "There is a time for everything—a time to be laid-back and a time to be outraged; a time to be tolerant and a time to stand up and say, 'I'm not going to take this anymore.'" The challenge for all fighters, of course, is to be sure they find out what is now truly worth fighting against, and then to be sure they have something that is truly worth fighting for.

the only viable response to religious hostility is love, empathy, compassion, understanding—not more hostility. (What could be more pathetic than a hostile fight against hostility?)

The problem is, it builds into the idea that the world is divided into stupid people, evil people, and people who agree with me. The first thing you have to learn is that there are lots of brilliant, kind–hearted people who just disagree with you.

If you don't like it, then y'can jolly well lump it.

Honey girl, I don't care what you do as long as you're kind to everyone you meet.

compassion, that

To keep your mind positive, refuse to criticize, complain about, or condemn other people for anything.

I did not ask her to go from disliking her sister to loving her sister. I asked her to try to go from disliking her sister to feeling neutral about her sister. To do this for her own sake, so she didn't have to feel the unpleasant feeling of disliking someone. She did. Her thought changed from: "My sister is unreasonable." To: "My sister doing what my sister does." She felt relief. Isn't

It is easy enough to reject a story because you do not like what it says, but wiser to examine it first, to see what can be learned from it.