Bigotry is an incapacity to conceive seriously the alternative to a proposition.
Interpretation
Bigotry limits one's ability to understand and appreciate differing viewpoints.
This quote by Gilbert K. Chesterton highlights how bigotry stems from a closed mindset that refuses to entertain alternative perspectives. It emphasizes that the inability to seriously consider objections or opposing ideas leads to a narrow and often misguided worldview, ultimately hindering personal growth and societal understanding.
In practice
This quote can be used in a debate about tolerance and understanding in diverse societies.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
The media love to cover black people on the front page. After all, when you live in a society that will lock up about 30 percent of all black men at some time in their lives and send more of them to prison than to college, chances are a fair number of those black faces will end up in the newspaper.
Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.
The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady, yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet.
We are like a judge confronted by a defendant who declines to answer, and we must determine the truth from the circumstantial evidence.
The anarch wages his own wars, even when marching in rank and file
I live in my house as I live inside my skin: I know more beautiful, more ample, more sturdy and more picturesque skins: but it would seem to me unnatural to exchange them for mine.
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