Love Quote by Frank Knox

Knox frames tolerance as civilization's highest finished product, and that choice of metaphor matters. He is not praising tolerance as a passive virtue you inherit by living in a modern society; he is treating it as a deliberate craft, something made through pressure, contact, and restraint. "Nothing finer" is a superlative with a political edge: it demotes technology, wealth, even national glory, and replaces them with a character ideal that can actually hold a pluralistic country together.

The phrasing does two jobs at once. "Thinks and practices" refuses the easy version of tolerance as polite sentiment. Thinking suggests an intellectual discipline: the ability to see your own beliefs as contingent, to understand others without surrendering judgment. Practicing suggests the harder part: what you do when you have power, when you're irritated, when your community is afraid. Knox is drawing a line between abstract broad-mindedness and the everyday decisions that make it real - hiring, voting, policing speech, treating minorities as full citizens rather than tolerated guests.

As a public servant writing in the first half of the 20th century, Knox is speaking into a world where the failures of tolerance were not theoretical. The era was thick with nativism, anti-Semitism, segregation, labor violence, and the rise of authoritarian politics abroad. "With all my heart" signals that this is more than administrative principle; it's a moral plea from inside institutions that can easily turn coercive. The subtext is a warning: civilization doesn't collapse only from enemy armies. It rots when it forgets that tolerance must be practiced, especially by those who run the place.