Tolerable Quotes - Page 3

• Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it than the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Children, Teaching, Tolerance

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• No previous civilization has been able to achieve it, nor can we see even in the remote distance, that day of the Messiah, when national barriers will no longer exist and all mankind will live in brotherhood and concord. Until then, the nations must narrow their aspirations to achieve a tolerable modus vivendi.

  Leon Pinsker

  Distance, Civilization, Israel

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• But then why, when talking on the phone, did they quarrel, on average at least once every four sentences? Maybe, though the inspector, it was an effect of the distance between them becoming less and less tolerable with each passing day, since as we grow old - for every now and then one must, yes, look reality in the eye and call things by their proper names - we feel more keenly the need to have the person we love beside us.

  Andrea Camilleri

  Love, Distance, Eye

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• The best known evil is the most tolerable.

  Livy

  Evil, Known

  "History of Rome". Book by Livy. Book XXIII, section 3,

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• Today, however, anti-vaccine activists go out of their way to claim that they are not anti-vaccine; they’re pro-vaccine. They just want vaccines to be safer. This is a much softer, less radical, more tolerable message, allowing them greater access to the media. However, because anti-vaccine activists today define safe as free from side effects such as autism, learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, diabetes, strokes, heart attacks, and blood clots—conditions that aren’t caused by vaccines—safer vaccines, using their definition, can never be made.

  Paul A. Offit

  Heart, Blood, Vaccines

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• This is a common experience in my traveling. I plod along, thinking what a miserable world this is and what miserable fellows we that inhabit it, wondering what it is tempts men to live in it; but anon I leave the towns behind and am lost in some boundless heath, and life becomes gradually more tolerable, if not even glorious.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Travel, Home, Men

  Henry David Thoreau (1962). “Journal”

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• Justice is the tolerable accommodation of the conflicting interests of society, and I don't believe there is any royal road to attain such accommodation concretely.

  Learned Hand

  Believe, Law Courts, Justice

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• Suburb: a place that isn't city, isn't country, and isn't tolerable.

  Mignon McLaughlin

  Country, Cities, Suburbs

  Mignon McLaughlin (2014). “Aperçus: The Aphorisms of Mignon McLaughlin”, p.39, BookBaby

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• There is a quiet repose and steadiness about the happiness of age, if the life has been well spent. Its feebleness is not painful. The nervous system has lost its acuteness. But, in mature years we feel that a burn, a scald, a cut, is more tolerable than it was in the sensitive period of youth.

  William Hazlitt

  Cutting, Years, Age

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• Just as a royal rule, if not a mere name, must exist by virtue of some great personal superiority in the king, so tyranny, which is the worst of governments, is necessarily the farthest removed from a well-constituted form; oligarchy is little better, for it is a long way from aristocracy, and democracy is the most tolerable of the three.

  Aristotle

  Kings, Names, Government

  Aristotle (2013). “The Essential Aristotle”, p.299, Simon and Schuster

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• When you've only got few days of rehearsal before you're in the studio, it's wonderful to start off with people that you have good, friendly, tolerable relationships to start with, for the simple reason that you don't have to spend 24 hours figuring out how sensitive they are, and can you give them a line reading, or how do you have to give them direction.

  John Cleese

  Reading, Good Friend, Simple

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• The optimum portfolio depends on the various expectations of choices available and the degree of variance in performance which is tolerable. The greater the number of selections, the less will be the average year-to-year variation in actual versus expected results. Also, the lower will be the expected results, assuming different choices have different expectations of performance.

  Warren Buffett

  Average, Years, Numbers

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• For a man who finds life tolerable only by staying on the surface of himself, it is natural to be satisfied with offering no more than his surface to others. There are few demands to be met, and no commitment is required. Marriage, on the other hand, closes the door. Your existence is confined to a narrow space in which you are constantly forced to reveal yourself – and therefore, constantly obliged to look into yourself, to examine your own depths.

  Paul Auster

  Commitment, Space, Offering

  Paul Auster (2011). “Collected Prose”, p.17, Faber & Faber

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• When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my rusty lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the most devilish pain burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. - Harry Haller

  Hermann Hesse

  Pain, Air, Breathing

  Hermann Hesse (1980). “Six Novels: With Other Stories and Essays”

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• Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.

  Herman Melville

  Judgement, Missionary, Enlightened

  Herman Melville (2006). “Moby Dick, The Whale: Easyread Edition”, p.3, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody not greatly in fault themselves to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.

  Jane Austen

  Guilt, Comfort, Done

  Jane Austen (2014). “Jane Austen Collection: illustrated - 6 eBooks and 140+ illustrations”, p.870, Ageless Reads

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• Marry first, and love will come after is a shocking assertion; since a thousand things may happen to make the state but barely tolerable, when it is entered into with mutual affection.

  Samuel Richardson

  And Love, May, Firsts

  Samuel Richardson (1751). “Clarissa; Or, The History of a Young Lady: Comprehending the Most Important Concerns of Private Life”, p.420

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• Democracies are indeed slow to make war, but once embarked upon a martial venture are equally slow to make peace and reluctant to make a tolerable, rather than a vindictive, peace.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  War, Democracy, Venture

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• It was over now, and the meaningless world was tolerable and need not be explained. And never would it be, and how foolish I had ever been to think so.

  Anne Rice

  Thinking, World, Needs

  Anne Rice (2011). “New Tales of the Vampires: includes Pandora and Vittorio the Vampire”, p.110, Ballantine Books

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• We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

  J. M. Coetzee

  Ignorance, Certain, Blindness

  J. M. Coetzee (2017). “Foe: A Novel”, p.98, Penguin

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• To somebody like Obama, substantive opposition is not tolerable. The objective is to eliminate all opposition - be it a political party, be it media, or what have you.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Party, Media, Political

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• The businessman is only tolerable so long as his gains can be held to bear some relation to what, roughly and in some sense, his activities have contributed to society.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Long, Gains, Bears

  John Maynard Keynes, Royal Economic Society (Great Britain) (1972). “The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes: Essays in persuasion”

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• The running pants were tolerable, Drustan decided, relieved. The blue trews had clearly been a torture device and would have strangled a man's seed. Mayhap men were fashioned differently in her time. He hadn't seen one other bulge out there on the street; mayhap they all had wee carrots in their trews.

  Karen Marie Moning

  Running, Men, Blue

  Karen Marie Moning (2012). “The Highlander Series 7-Book Bundle”, p.808, Dell

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• School would be way more tolerable if everyone wasn’t so afraid to be who they really are. And if everyone else would let them.

  Susane Colasanti

  School, Would Be, Way

  Susane Colasanti (2012). “Keep Holding On”, p.21, Penguin

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• Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best, he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear his shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Learning, Math, Shoes

  Time Enough for Love "Intermission" (1973)

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