Daily Inspiration Quote by Frank Moore Colby

Persecution, Colby suggests, has the rude decency of attention. If someone is coming for you, at least they have to see you clearly enough to hate you. Tolerance, by contrast, can be a social shrug dressed up as virtue: the kind of live-and-let-live that requires almost nothing, risks nothing, and often costs less than changing the subject. It’s a deliberately abrasive inversion of the feel-good civic mantra, and it works because it pokes at a recognizable modern posture: the pride of being “reasonable” without the burden of being responsible.

The line’s bite comes from its arithmetic. “Nine parts apathy to one of brotherly love” sounds like a recipe, a measured critique of moral laziness. Colby isn’t attacking tolerance as a political necessity; he’s attacking tolerance as a self-congratulating mood. The subtext is that a society can congratulate itself for not persecuting while still refusing solidarity. You can be “tolerant” of your neighbor’s difference while never defending them when the landlord, the school board, or the mob decides their difference is inconvenient.

Context matters: as an educator writing in an era when mass politics and social sorting were sharpening (immigration panics, Red Scares, sectarian tensions), Colby is wary of the way institutions teach civility as an endpoint rather than a baseline. He’s insisting that the opposite of persecution isn’t tolerance; it’s care with consequences. Tolerance that’s mostly apathy is peace without commitment, and it evaporates the moment commitment is required.