"No human trait deserves less tolerance in everyday life, and gets less, than intolerance"
About this Quote
Leopardi turns a seeming tautology into a moral insight: the least tolerable trait is intolerance, and ordinary social life instinctively withholds tolerance from it. The sentence works on two levels at once. It prescribes a standard for living together, and it describes what usually happens around a rigid, dogmatic person. Intolerance refuses reciprocity; it demands room for itself while denying room to others. That asymmetry makes everyday cooperation impossible, so people recoil from it not only on principle but out of practical self‑defense.
There is a paradox here that later thinkers made famous: to preserve tolerance, one must be intolerant of intolerance. Leopardi anticipates that logic without jargon. He does not advocate blanket niceness; he points to the boundary that allows pluralism to function. Patience, courtesy, and the willingness to let others be are negotiable until someone insists that only one way of being is permitted. At that point, leniency toward the illiberal becomes complicity against everyone else.
The line also fits Leopardi’s broader sensibility. An early nineteenth‑century Italian poet and philosopher, he was renowned for lucid pessimism. In the Zibaldone and in his aphoristic writings, he dismantled consoling illusions while urging a humane solidarity among fellow sufferers. He doubted progress, but he valued compassion and mutual indulgence as the only relief against life’s hardships. Intolerance, by contrast, multiplies harm. It isolates its bearer, chills conversation, and turns the inevitable frictions of daily life into contempt.
There is a sting of irony, too. People are quick to denounce intolerance while practicing it under other names. Leopardi’s formulation reminds us that the social sanction against intolerance is justified, but it also demands vigilance about our own rigidity. The target is not disagreement or conviction, but the refusal to grant others the dignity of existing alongside us. Where that refusal appears, the least tolerance is not only deserved; it is necessary.
There is a paradox here that later thinkers made famous: to preserve tolerance, one must be intolerant of intolerance. Leopardi anticipates that logic without jargon. He does not advocate blanket niceness; he points to the boundary that allows pluralism to function. Patience, courtesy, and the willingness to let others be are negotiable until someone insists that only one way of being is permitted. At that point, leniency toward the illiberal becomes complicity against everyone else.
The line also fits Leopardi’s broader sensibility. An early nineteenth‑century Italian poet and philosopher, he was renowned for lucid pessimism. In the Zibaldone and in his aphoristic writings, he dismantled consoling illusions while urging a humane solidarity among fellow sufferers. He doubted progress, but he valued compassion and mutual indulgence as the only relief against life’s hardships. Intolerance, by contrast, multiplies harm. It isolates its bearer, chills conversation, and turns the inevitable frictions of daily life into contempt.
There is a sting of irony, too. People are quick to denounce intolerance while practicing it under other names. Leopardi’s formulation reminds us that the social sanction against intolerance is justified, but it also demands vigilance about our own rigidity. The target is not disagreement or conviction, but the refusal to grant others the dignity of existing alongside us. Where that refusal appears, the least tolerance is not only deserved; it is necessary.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
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