"The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision"
About this Quote
Tolerance, George Eliot suggests, isnt a handshake between equals; its a burden unevenly distributed toward the person who can actually see the whole room. The line is a rebuke to the familiar complaint that patience should be perfectly reciprocal. Eliot flips that instinct: if you have the wider vision - more education, more social power, more psychological insight, more experience of how motives tangle - you also have fewer excuses for cruelty.
The intent is moral, but not sentimental. Eliot was a novelist of consequences, fascinated by how small acts of judgment calcify into lifelong harm. In that world, "tolerance" isnt a vague virtue; its an ethical discipline, a decision to restrain the easy pleasures of contempt. The subtext is that intolerance is often a failure of imagination: the inability, or refusal, to hold competing truths at once. Wider vision means you can recognize that a person can be wrong and still human, infuriating and still shaped by pressures you dont share.
Context matters: Eliot lived in Victorian England, where moral certainty was a social sport and deviation - religious doubt, sexual scandal, class transgression - carried real penalties. She herself was deemed improper for living openly with George Henry Lewes outside marriage. So this isnt abstract liberalism; its a demand aimed at the respectable, the confident, the ones protected by convention. If you benefit from the systems that narrow other peoples lives, Eliot implies, you dont get to demand they be gracious first. You go first.
The intent is moral, but not sentimental. Eliot was a novelist of consequences, fascinated by how small acts of judgment calcify into lifelong harm. In that world, "tolerance" isnt a vague virtue; its an ethical discipline, a decision to restrain the easy pleasures of contempt. The subtext is that intolerance is often a failure of imagination: the inability, or refusal, to hold competing truths at once. Wider vision means you can recognize that a person can be wrong and still human, infuriating and still shaped by pressures you dont share.
Context matters: Eliot lived in Victorian England, where moral certainty was a social sport and deviation - religious doubt, sexual scandal, class transgression - carried real penalties. She herself was deemed improper for living openly with George Henry Lewes outside marriage. So this isnt abstract liberalism; its a demand aimed at the respectable, the confident, the ones protected by convention. If you benefit from the systems that narrow other peoples lives, Eliot implies, you dont get to demand they be gracious first. You go first.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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