Politics & Power Quote by Frank Knox

Tolerance, Knox implies, is not a policy position; it is a moral feat. By pairing it with "the quality of mercy", he borrows the gravity of a virtue we already treat as scarce and difficult. Mercy is what you offer when you have every procedural right to punish; tolerance is what you offer when you have every social permission to sneer. The line works because it quietly demotes "progress in liberal thought" from a triumphal narrative to a flattering self-description. We can modernize our vocabulary and still keep our reflexes.

Knox was a public servant in an era when the word "liberal" carried both the promise of reform and the anxiety of upheaval: mass immigration debates, labor unrest, the Red Scare, world war, and the churn of modern media. In that atmosphere, toleration could easily become a badge worn by the educated classes while everyday life remained organized around exclusions that felt normal: who belongs, who gets believed, whose discomfort counts.

The subtext is a warning against mistaking ideology for character. "Even today" suggests the familiar pattern: each generation congratulates itself on being more enlightened than the last, then discovers a new out-group or a new heresy to treat as beyond the pale. Knox is also hedging: "I suspect" is a bureaucrat's modesty, but it sharpens the critique by sounding reasonable rather than prophetic. He isn't indicting liberalism as such; he's indicting the complacency that liberalism can breed when it confuses better arguments with better hearts.