Politics & Power Quote by Rocco Buttiglione

Liberty gets framed here less as a vibe than as a job with teeth: you tolerate the other person not because they are secretly right, but because they are allowed to be wrong. Buttiglione stages liberal society as a double-edged discipline. On one edge is maximal protection of expression (the melodramatic "give my life" ups the stakes and dares you to treat rights as non-negotiable). On the other edge is the insistence that pluralism is not politeness: you retain the right to name error, to argue, to judge.

The subtext is a rebuke to two modern temptations that often travel under liberal branding. First, the illiberal urge to silence in the name of harm reduction or social peace: if you refuse the other person the space to err publicly, you are no longer defending liberty, you're managing it. Second, the softer but equally corrosive move where tolerance becomes moral relativism - where the price of coexistence is pretending disagreements aren't real. Buttiglione is drawing a boundary: rights are equal; ideas are not.

Context matters because Buttiglione, as a Catholic-influenced European politician, was famously entangled in early-2000s debates about sexuality, religious conscience, and public office. Read through that lens, the quote is also a rhetorical preemptive strike: I will defend your civil rights even as I reserve the right to call your values mistaken. It's liberalism as a shield against censorship, and as cover for moral critique - a claim that public disagreement is not persecution but a core civic practice.