Daily Inspiration Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Buckley’s jab lands because it weaponizes a familiar liberal self-image: the open-minded referee of public debate. The line is built like a trap. In the first clause, “Liberals claim” frames tolerance as branding, not belief. In the second, “shocked and offended” turns that branding into a tell: the performance collapses the moment dissent arrives in the room with its shoes on.

The intent isn’t to argue policy; it’s to puncture a moral posture. Buckley is doing what he did best as a Cold War-era conservative impresario: recasting liberalism not as a set of mistaken ideas but as a social temperament - confident in its own decency, thin-skinned about contradiction. The humor is acid, but it’s also strategic. If liberals are uniquely intolerant, then liberal control of institutions (media, academia, “respectable” culture) can be portrayed as hypocritical gatekeeping rather than normative consensus. The punchline doesn’t just mock; it pre-licenses conservative grievance.

Subtext: pluralism is fine until it demands you treat certain views as legitimate. Buckley implies liberals want “a hearing” only for views that already pass their moral screening. That’s a fair critique of any ideological ecosystem that confuses civility with agreement, but Buckley’s framing also smuggles in a counter-move: if liberals exclude a view, the exclusion proves liberal intolerance, not the view’s extremity.

Context matters. Buckley rose alongside modern American conservatism as it fought for cultural credibility against New Deal liberal dominance. This quip is a culture-war scalpel: it shifts the argument from what should be said to who gets to decide what counts as sayable.