tolerance quotes

Abraham Joshua Heschel: 

The problem to be faced is: how to combine loyalty to one's own tradition with reverence for different traditions.

Abraham Lincoln: 

Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict [slavery] might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

Bertrand Russell: 

Collective fear stimulates herd instinct, and tends to produce ferocity toward those who are not regarded as members of the herd.

Eleanor Holmes Norton: 

The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with.

Eric Hoffer: 

The capacity for getting along with our neighbor depends to a large extent on the capacity for getting along with ourselves. The self-respecting individual will try to be as tolerant of his neighbor's shortcomings as he is of his own.

Eric Hoffer: 

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.

Evelyn Beatrice Hall: 

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. (paraphrasing Voltaire)

George Washington Carver: 

How far you go in life depends on you being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.

Jerome Nathanson: 

The price of the democratic way of life is a growing appreciation of people's differences, not merely as tolerable, but as the essence of a rich and rewarding human experience.

John Godfrey Saxe: 

So oft in theologic wars,
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean,
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!
1887: referring to the Buddhist fable of the Blind Sages and the Elephant, found in the Udana, chapter 6, section 4


Mohandas K. Gandhi: 

It is the duty of every cultured man or woman to read sympathetically the scriptures of the world. If we are to respect others' religions as we would have them respect our own, a friendly study of the world's religions is a sacred duty.

Paul McCartney: 

I used to think anyone doing anything weird was weird. Now I know that it is the people that call others weird that are weird.

Paul Ricoeur : 

If it is true that there is always more than one way of construing a text, it is not true that all interpretations are equal.

Rene Dubos: 

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival. 
Celebrations of Life, 1981 


Robert F. Kennedy: 

Ultimately, America's answer to the intolerant man is diversity, the very diversity which our heritage of religious freedom has inspired.

Robert Louis Stevenson: 

There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it behooves all of us not to talk about the rest of us.

Susan B. Anthony: 

I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon.
on the Women's Suffrage platform


Thomas Jefferson: 

Difference of opinion is helpful in religion.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: 

All ... religions show the same disparity between belief and practice, and each is safe till it tries to exclude the rest. Test each sect by its best or its worst as you will, by its high-water mark of virtue or its low-water mark of vice. But falsehood begins when you measure the ebb of any other religion against the flood-tide of your own. There is a noble and a base side to every history.

Voltaire: 

Monsieur l'abbe, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write.

Voltaire: 

What is tolerance? -- it is the consequence of humanity. We are all formed of frailty and error; let us pardon reciprocally each other's folly -- that is the first law of nature.

Voltaire: 

Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so too.