Tolerance Quotes

“Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure.”
― H.L. Mencken

“If we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity.

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

“You are evidence of your mother's strength, especially if you are a rebellious knucklehead and regardless she has always maintained her sanity.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Never judge someone
By the way he looks
Or a book by the way it's covered;
For inside those tattered pages,
There's a lot to be discovered”
― Stephen Cosgrove

“Don't get so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”
― Bill Maher

“Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Tolerance only for those who agree with you is no tolerance at all.”
― Ray A. Davis

“It’s hard to be different,” Scarborough said. “And perhaps the best answer is not to tolerate differences, not even to accept them. But to celebrate them. Maybe then those who are different would feel more loved, and less, well, tolerated.”
― Bill Konigsberg, Openly Straight

“The liberal idea of tolerance is more and more a kind of intolerance. What it means is 'Leave me alone; don't harass me; I'm intolerant towards your over-proximity.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“...But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice... I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can.”
― Charles Darwin, The Life & Letters of Charles Darwin

“I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.”
― Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Nowadays, you can do anything that you want—anal, oral, fisting—but you need to be wearing gloves, condoms, protection.”
― Slavoj Žižek

“It made me shiver. And I about made up my mind to pray, and see if I couldn't try to quit being the kind of a boy I was and be better. So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn't come. Why wouldn't they? It warn't no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from ME, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn't come. It was because my heart warn't right; it was because I warn't square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting ON to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth SAY I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write to that nigger's owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie, and He knowed it. You can't pray a lie--I found that out.

So I was full of trouble, full as I could be; and didn't know what to do. At last I had an idea; and I says, I'll go and write the letter--and then see if I can pray. Why, it was astonishing, the way I felt as light as a feather right straight off, and my troubles all gone. So I got a piece of paper and a pencil, all glad and excited, and set down and wrote:

Miss Watson, your runaway nigger Jim is down here two mile below Pikesville, and Mr. Phelps has got him and he will give him up for the reward if you send.

HUCK FINN.

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.”
― Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“If I do not believe as you believe, it proves that you do not believe as I believe, and that is all that it proves.”
― Thomas Paine

“When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novel teaches us to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“He began to realize that you cannot even fight happily with creatures that stand upon a different mental basis to yourself.”
― H.G. Wells

“Foulmouthed individuals seem to have their neuron systems replaced by colon structures, given that their terminology profusely consists of "sh*t and f*ck". ("Tolerance zero")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“As you walk through forests
or the meadows of your mind,
Stop and talk to those you fear
Good friendships you may find”
― Stephen Cosgrove, Buttermilk Bear

“All men are made one for another: either then teach them better or bear with them.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“That's ridiculous. The only point in having enemies is so you can defeat them, kill them, brush them aside."

"Or give them a chance to redeem themselves.”
― Derek Landy, Death Bringer

“You just sit there and tolerate it, the same way everything in this country is tolerated. Every deception, every lie, every bullet in the brains. Just as you are already tolerating bullets in the brains that will be implemented only after the bullet is put in your brains.”
― Imre Kertész, Liquidation

“Do not deride someone's faith simply because you do not share it, Lord Cladent," Sazed said quietly.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Well of Ascension

“Since we are living in an open society with a space for tolerance and indulgence, we must monitor assiduously the permanent changes of habits and customs and the "normality barometer" should be determined and adjusted, time after time. ("On a doggy day”)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The efficiency of the cleaning solution in liquefying wizards suggested the operation of an antithetical principal,which-"
"Did you have to get him started?" Cimorene asked reproachfully.”
― Patricia C. Wrede, Calling on Dragons

“No boundary or barrier surrounds the heart of a person that loves their self and others.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The man who is most aggressive in teaching tolerance is the most intolerant of all: he wants a world full of people too timid and ashamed to really disagree with anything.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“These days, it feels to me like you make a devil's pact when you walk into this country. You hand over your passport at the check-in, you get stamped, you want to make a little money, get yourself started... but you mean to go back! Who would want to stay? Cold, wet, miserable; terrible food, dreadful newspapers - who would want to stay? In a place where you are never welcomed, only tolerated. Just tolerated. Like you are an animal finally house-trained.”
― Zadie Smith, White Teeth

“The Perfect Way is only difficult for those who pick and choose;
Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear.
Make a hairbreadth difference, and Heaven and Earth are set apart;
If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against.
The struggle between 'for' and 'against' is the mind's worst disease;”
― Jianzhi Sengcan

“You can argue that it's a different world now than the one when Matthew Shepard was killed, but there is a subtle difference between tolerance and acceptance. It's the distance between moving into the cul-de-sac and having your next door neighbor trust you to keep an eye on her preschool daughter for a few minutes while she runs out to the post office. It's the chasm between being invited to a colleague's wedding with your same-sex partner and being able to slow-dance without the other guests whispering.”
― Jodi Picoult, Sing You Home

“Bahujanahitāya bahujanasukhāya lokānukampāya:

For the good of the many, for the happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world.”
― Gautama Buddha