Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Bigotry

"Bigotry dwarfs the soul but shutting out the truth." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"Bigotry has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel." -

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it." -

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own." - Edwin Hubbell Chapin

"There is no bigotry like that of "free thought" run to seed." - Charles Caleb Colton

"Bigotry is a chronic dogmatism." - Horace Greeley

"The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may; be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale." - James Bryant Conant

"Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it." -

"Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Religion is the relation of the soul to God, and therefore the progress of sectarianism marks the decline of religion. Religion is as effectively destroyed by bigotry as by indifference." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Bigotry has no head and cannot think, no heart and cannot feel. " - Daniel O’Connell

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." -

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong." - G. K. Chesterton, fully Gilbert Keith Chesterton

"The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for giving to Mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." - George Washington

"We have abundant reason to rejoice, that, in this land, the light of truth and reason has triumphed over the power of bigotry and superstition, and that every person may here worship God according to the dictates of his own heart. In this enlightened age, & in this land of equal liberty, it is our boast, that a man's religious tenets will not forfeit the protection of the laws, nor deprive him of the right of attaining & holding the highest offices that are known in the United States." - George Washington

"During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry and persecution." - James Madison

"It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects... that is was deemed advisable to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject." - Joseph Story

"Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda. Our mission, therefore, is to confront ignorance with knowledge, bigotry with tolerance, and isolation with the outstretched hand of generosity. Racism can, will, and must be defeated." - Kofi Annan, fully Kofi Atta Annan

"The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer." - Albert Einstein

"We've got to get rid of this discrimination, this chilling, this bigotry toward gays and lesbians that are reflected in literally hundreds and hundreds of statutes and regulations in this country." - Ralph Nader

"Society requires honest and able leadership; and if natural and institutional differences are destroyed, presently some tyrant or host of squalid oligarchs will create new forms of inequality." - Russell Kirk

"A place for everything, and everything in its place" - Samuel Smiles

"We should be determined... to sever ourselves from the union we so much value rather than give up the rights of self-government... in which alone we see liberty, safety and happiness." - Thomas Jefferson

"As I am never better than when I am mad; then methinks I am a brave fellow; then I do wonders: but reason abuseth me, and there’s the torment, there’s the hell." - Thomas Kyd

"Government is a necessary evil, like other go-carts and crutches. Our need of it shows exactly how far we are still children. All governing over much kills the self-help and energy of the governed." - Wendell Phillips

"I would that my photographs might be, not the coverage of a news event, but an indictment of war – the brutal corrupting viciousness of its doing to the minds and bodies of men; and, that my photographs might be a powerful emotional catalyst to the reasoning which would help this vile and criminal stupidity from beginning again." - W. Eugene Smith, fully William Eugene Smith

"Suspicions are nothing more nor less than wrinkles. Early youth has none. What overwhelms Othello glides over Candide." - Victor Hugo

"Leo Tolstoy, the greatest anti-patriot of our time, defines patriotism as the principle that will justify the training of wholesale murderers; a trade that requires better equipment in the exercise of man-killing than the making of such necessities as shoes, clothing, and houses; a trade that guarantees better returns and greater glory than that of the honest workingman." - Emma Goldman

"There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical." - Emma Goldman