Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Barzun

Barzun’s line lands like a polite shove: it rejects the comforting fantasy that better language automatically produces better people. As an educator who spent a lifetime watching institutions professionalize virtue, he’s suspicious of anything that treats morality as a compliance system. “Legislate tolerance” is carefully chosen; it conjures rules, enforcement, and the bureaucratic impulse to tidy up messy human feeling. Tolerance, in his view, isn’t a policy outcome. It’s a cultural habit, built slowly through exposure, argument, and the unglamorous practice of living alongside people you don’t like.

The sting is in the second clause. Political correctness, he argues, doesn’t dissolve hostility; it gives it a filing cabinet. When public speech gets patrolled, resentment doesn’t vanish, it mutates. People learn new euphemisms, new codes, and new ways to sort insiders from outsiders. “Organizes hatred” suggests structure: teams, scripts, orthodoxies, denunciations. The subtext is less “free speech absolutism” than a warning about moral administration: when a community replaces persuasion with shaming, it can create a perverse clarity. Everyone knows what to say, and everyone knows whom to blame.

Barzun wrote out of a 20th-century university world increasingly shaped by mass politics and institutional gatekeeping. His critique anticipates a dynamic familiar now: the stricter the etiquette, the more tempting the backlash identity. The line works because it refuses sentimentality. It’s an argument that civility without curiosity becomes theater - and theater is a great place for grudges to find choreography.