Tolerance Quotes

“Religion is like a pair of shoes.....Find one that fits for you, but don't make me wear your shoes.”
― George Carlin

“It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.”
― Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

“It's an universal law-- intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education. An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

“Reinette: One may tolerate a world of demons for the sake of an angel.”
― Steven Moffat

“Resolve to be tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the wrong. Sometime in life you will have been all of these.”
― George Washington Carver

“Christian, Jew, Muslim, shaman, Zoroastrian, stone, ground, mountain, river, each has a secret way of being with the mystery, unique and not to be judged”
― Jalal ad-Din Rumi

“Think for yourself and let others enjoy the privilege of doing so too.”
― Voltaire, Traité sur la tolérance, à l'occasion de la mort de Jean Calas

“The so-called paradox of freedom is the argument that freedom in the sense of absence of any constraining control must lead to very great restraint, since it makes the bully free to enslave the meek. The idea is, in a slightly different form, and with very different tendency, clearly expressed in Plato.

Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law, and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.”
― Karl Raimund Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

“Men build too many walls and not enough bridges.”
― Joseph Fort Newton

“The highest result of education is tolerance”
― Helen Keller

“Do not let your assumptions about a culture block your ability to perceive the individual, or you will fail.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Laws alone can not secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”
― Albert Einstein

“Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.”
― Malcolm X

“Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil.”
― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

“Love thy enemies, it says in the scriptures. My foster mother always added, "At the very least, you will be polite to them.”
― Patricia Briggs, Moon Called

“Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated.”
― Kofi Annan

“Tolerance of intolerance is cowardice.”
― Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I have good idea, for if you meet some person from different religion and he want to make argument about God. My idea is, you listen to everything this man say about God. Never argue about God with him. Best thing to say is, 'I agree with you.' Then you go home, pray what you want. This is my idea for people to have peace about religion.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love

“I ain't grouchy,” Teft snapped. “I just have a low threshold for stupidity.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Accepting all the good and bad about someone. It's a great thing to aspire to. The hard part is actually doing it.”
― Sarah Dessen, What Happened to Goodbye

“Everyone on Earth, they'd tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”
― Michelle Obama, Becoming

“In order to have faith in his own path, he does not need to prove that someone else's path is wrong.”
― Paulo Coelho, Warrior of the Light

“I am a lover of truth, a worshiper of freedom, a celebrant at the altar of language and purity and tolerance.”
― Stephen Fry

“If man is to survive, he will have learned to take a delight in the essential differences between men and between cultures. He will learn that differences in ideas and attitudes are a delight, part of life's exciting variety, not something to fear.”
― Gene Roddenberry

“Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”
― Timothy Keller

“In the practice of tolerance, one's enemy is the best teacher.”
― Dalai Lama XIV

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

[Commencement Address at American University, June 10 1963]”
― John F. Kennedy

“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair...the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
― Bertrand Russell

“One's enemy is often the best teacher of tolerance.”
― Colleen Houck, Tiger's Quest