Politics & Power Quote by Robert Frost

Frost’s jab lands because it sounds like praise while smuggling in an accusation: that “broadmindedness” can curdle into a kind of moral absenteeism. The line is built like a compliment you realize is a slap halfway through. “Liberal” is framed less as a political label than as a temperament, a person so committed to seeing every angle that he can’t commit to any angle when it matters. The comedy is in the image of a “quarrel” where even your “own side” becomes just another interesting perspective to audit.

The intent isn’t to dunk on tolerance itself; it’s to needle a specific performance of tolerance: the self-congratulating neutrality that treats conviction as provincial. Frost, a poet obsessed with boundaries - walls, roads diverging, the hard edges of rural life - had little patience for a mind that refuses to choose. His New England sensibility prizes judgment as a form of responsibility: you look, you weigh, then you stand somewhere, even if that stance is imperfect.

Subtextually, the quote targets a liberalism that prefers process to stakes. It hints at an elite habit: hovering above conflict, translating passion into “both-sides” analysis, then mistaking that distance for wisdom. Frost’s timing matters, too. In early 20th-century America, “liberal” was shifting from a general posture of open-minded reform to a more contested political identity amid labor battles, war debates, and cultural upheaval. In that climate, refusing to “take sides” wasn’t always sophistication; it could be complicity disguised as balance.