James Higgins Quotes

We cannot make the world safe for democracy unless we also make the world safe for diversity.

That's the beauty of democracy — you believe what you believe, I believe what I believe, and as long as we're not hurting each other, that's fine. Placing a value judgment on a person's beliefs has no place in a democracy.

Broad tolerance in the matter of beliefs is necessarily a part of the new ethics.

I'm an extreme libertarian, but I realize we're in a democracy, and in a democracy, people can have views of all stripes, and there's no reason to argue about it.

For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization.

A free society means that you might have to put up with a lot of things you despise.

America remains an open society in which opposing forces can surface and clash, a necessary precondition for their solution.

Two Cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.

We must protect the right of our opponents to speak, because we must hear what they have to say.

We have taken the idea of tolerance so far that we have to put up with intolerance.

Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered Expression

The doctrine of toleration requires a positive as well as a negative statement. It is not only wrong to burn a man on account of his creed, but it is right to encourage the open avowal and defense of every opinion sincerely maintained. Every man who says frankly and fully what he thinks is so far doing a public service. We should be grateful to him for attacking most unsparingly our most cherished opinions.

America is great precisely because it is an open society, and an open society recognizes that nobody is the ultimate arbiter — and that we may be wrong at times, even if we are powerful. We must be open to criticism and respect divergent and different views and interests.

There is social intimidation by the self-appointed brigades of the thought police… they exist in every society, whether they are of the religious, nationalistic or atheistic variety. Dogmatists, who are convinced that they know better, that only the way they think is acceptable and who would deprive others of their right to hear differing and discordant voices.. They try to achieve this by either silencing the author or scaring away the public.

Politically, the surest way to ward off authoritarianism is to safeguard the public expression of diverse opinion and the democratic interactions that result.

There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty.

Some people will never live comfortably in a modern liberal democracy.

Our showy celebration of, and absolute insistence upon, individual autonomy and unconstrained diversity pushes those by nature least equipped to live comfortably in a liberal democracy not to the limits of their tolerance, but to their intolerant extremes.

Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

Democracy depends on the idea that we hold each others’ right to express ourselves and be heard above our own desire to always get the outcomes we want. You can’t impose tolerance top-down.

[…] the underlying problem is the soft progressive totalitarianism that seeks to compel submission to its creed. A powerful cultural establishment, now reinforced by political dominion in Washington, won’t tolerate deviance. Instead of learning to live at peace with the reality of pluralism, the essence of a successful democracy, it demands concordance with all of its ever-changing strictures. It ascribes dissent not to honest disagreement, differing experiences, diverse intellectual traditions or the basic human instinct for autonomy, but to malice and ignorance.

America's Founders were committed to a wide-open public forum in which all voices and perspectives could have a chance of being heard.

We are a country based on democracy, tolerance, and openness to the world.

A free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.

If the so called 'democratic' individuals out there really believe in their talk about diversity, they should let those with truly different opinions be allowed to talk freely in public, too.