Quotes About Tolerance

struck him as a favorable contrast with his own nation that there was no slavery in India;II and that though the population was divided into castes according to occupations, it accepted these divisions as natural and tolerable

Men in general are so constituted that there is nothing they will endure with so little patience as that views which they believe to be true should be counted crimes against the laws . . .

in calling other human beings "savage" or "barbarous" we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways.

I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

Intolerance is the natural concomitant of strong faith; tolerance grows only when faith loses certainty; certainty is murderous.

Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.

The man who says to me, 'Believe as I do, or God will damn you,' will presently say, 'Believe as I do, or I shall assassinate you.'"70 "By what right could a being created free force another to think like himself?"71 "A fanaticism composed of superstition and ignorance has been the sickness of all the centuries.

Let us face the fact: how else can we endure life on this earth unless we can achieve a large degree of tolerance of oneself and others? Life is far too painful if we are hypersensitive and look for the flaws in everything.

Because it seems to me that to be human you have to be able to compromise.

It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.

He who closes his ears to the views of others shows little confidence in the integrity of his own views.

Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasa educations.

Some people can stay longer in an hour than others can in a week.

ethnocentrism—the tendency to evaluate the customs of other groups according to one's own cultural standards.

Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them to learn that there are other points of view.

I'd have wasted a lot of time and trouble before I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone.

Just when do men that have different blood in them stop hating one another?

I learned that the best way to take all people, black or white, is to take them for what they think they are, then leave them alone. That was when I realised that a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior; a sort of obverse reflection of the white people he lives among.

I see all the while how folks could say he was queer, but that was the very reason couldn't nobody hold it personal. It was like he was outside of it too, same as you, and getting mad at it would be kind of like getting mad at a mud-puddle that splashed you when you stepped in it.

Get used to disappointment.

Having no use for such bourgeois virtues as tolerance, open-mindedness, and inclusiveness (which the revolutionary knows are usually cover-ups that allow the powerful to maintain social equilibrium rather than to be confronted and then to change), revolutionaries value honesty and confrontation—painful though they may be.

No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless

No one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse.

He, who was so monumentally intolerant by his very nature, was strangely tolerant of one human condition—a man's morals.