The New Year Quote by James Agate

A critic’s New Year’s resolution is supposed to smell faintly of self-improvement. Agate’s, instead, weaponizes the form. The opening pledge, “To tolerate fools more gladly,” borrows the cadence of moral uplift and even echoes a biblical register, as if he’s promising patience, charity, a softened ego. Then he snaps the trap shut: “provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.” The “provided” is the hinge where virtue becomes boundary-setting, and the boundary is brutally modern: time as the only nonrenewable resource worth defending.

The specific intent isn’t to become kinder; it’s to appear kinder without surrendering the critic’s central privilege, which is discrimination - of taste, of intellect, of company. Agate admits what polite society makes you conceal: tolerating “fools” is often less about compassion than about social friction management. He’ll grant them civility, not access. The subtext is a neat little theory of attention economics decades before the phrase existed. Fools aren’t merely wrong; they’re time-thieves, expanding to fill whatever patience you offer. Tolerance, in this worldview, is like feeding a stray cat: one act of kindness becomes a daily obligation.

Context matters. Agate came up in a culture where the critic functioned as gatekeeper, and public discourse prized epigrammatic cruelty as proof of discernment. His line performs that role while pretending to retire from it: a resolution that congratulates itself for generosity, then preserves the right to dismiss. The joke lands because it’s not only mean; it’s accurate about how “niceness” can become an unrequested appointment.