Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Interpretation
Tolerance cannot accept actions or beliefs that are intolerant.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing boundaries when it comes to tolerance. While it is essential to accept diverse perspectives, there are limits to this acceptance when faced with beliefs or actions that seek to undermine or destroy the very values of tolerance and coexistence. It calls for a balance between openness to differing views and safeguarding against harmful ideologies that promote intolerance.
In practice
During a debate on campus, this quote could be used to highlight the need for a respectful discourse while addressing hate speech.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
America means opportunity, freedom, power.
This is my philosophy on all life, not just when it comes to love. All the best things are terrifying, but that's why they're the best things. Nothing worth having comes easy. You have to be afraid to want it, afraid to lose it, afraid to try. If you feel that, then you know you're on to a winner.
For me, disability is a physical experience, but it's also a cultural experience and a social experience, and for me, the word 'crip' is the one that best encapsulated all of that.
The God of life summons us to life; more, to be lifegivers, especially toward those who lie under the heel of the powers.
The demands that good people make are upon themselves; Those that bad people make are upon others.
A truly religious man does not embrace a religion; and he who embraces one has no religion.
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