Life & Wisdom Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Tolerance, Coleridge implies, can become a weapon in the hands of people who want the moral high ground more than they want a plural society. The line is built on a compact paradox: “great intolerance” doesn’t merely coexist with “support of tolerance,” it can be performed as its proof. The phrasing “I have seen” matters. He’s not offering a tidy philosophical puzzle; he’s testifying, with a poet’s eye for hypocrisy, to a social habit: the zealot who condemns zealotry.

Coleridge was writing in the long wake of the French Revolution, when “tolerance” and “liberty” were rallying cries that also justified purges, shaming, and coercion. In Britain, that argument echoed in debates about dissenters, Catholics, and free-thinkers: who gets included, who gets policed, and who decides what counts as “reasonable” belief. The subtext is less “tolerance is bad” than “tolerance is fragile when it becomes an identity.” Once “tolerant” is a badge, it invites gatekeeping. People start enforcing tolerance as a doctrine, treating deviation as heresy, and punishing others in the name of openness.

The quote works because it names a familiar cultural move: turning a principle into a cudgel. It also anticipates a modern dynamic of virtue-signaling and purity tests, where the performance of benevolence can slide into cruelty. Coleridge’s warning lands because it’s symmetrical: intolerance isn’t only the obvious villain in jackboots; it can show up in enlightened clothing, certain it’s saving the room while it clears it.