Leadership Quote by Martin Van Buren

A nineteenth-century politician is trying to make repression sound like prudence, and he does it with the cool logic of a warning label. Van Buren’s line sets up a stark hierarchy: whatever harms might come from “inhibition” (restriction, suppression, policing) are, he insists, less “pernicious” than the harms of “toleration” (letting the thing exist in public life). It’s a neat rhetorical switch: the real danger isn’t the heavy hand of authority; it’s the chaos that allegedly follows if authority looks away.

The intent is defensive and preemptive. By claiming “no evil can result” from inhibition that’s worse than toleration, he isn’t weighing evidence so much as foreclosing debate. The sentence is engineered to make coercion feel like the moderate option. “Inhibition” reads almost clinical, a mild technical fix, while “toleration” is framed as a moral failure that metastasizes. The subtext is political triage: if you’re worried about backlash, civil unrest, or sectional fracture, accept suppression now because the alternative will be catastrophic later.

Context matters because Van Buren governed at the edge of national rupture. In the era’s most combustible disputes - especially slavery and abolitionist agitation - leaders routinely treated speech and organizing as accelerants. This kind of phrasing fits a governing style that prized stability and party discipline over moral confrontation. It’s also a prototype of a recurring American argument: liberties are negotiable when the state decides permissiveness is the greater threat. The elegance of the line is that it makes that bargain sound not just necessary, but hygienic.