Life & Wisdom Quote by Phyllis McGinley

Tolerance is never just a virtue in McGinley’s line; it’s a costume with a press badge. “Those wearing tolerance for a label” skewers the performative kind of open-mindedness that turns into a social accessory: something you put on so you can be seen, not something you practice when it costs you. The verb “wearing” does quiet demolition work, implying surface, convenience, and the possibility of taking it off the moment the room changes.

The sting lands in the second half: the label becomes a cudgel. By announcing themselves tolerant, these people grant themselves moral jurisdiction to declare “other views intolerable.” McGinley is targeting the paradox that has only gotten sharper in modern discourse: tolerance, once a commitment to coexist with disagreement, can mutate into a purity test that polices dissent. The subtext is less “everything should be allowed” than “watch how quickly the rhetoric of openness turns into gatekeeping.”

Context matters. Writing in mid-century America, McGinley was famous for a poised, domestically keyed satire that nonetheless had teeth about status, manners, and the ideological fashions of her day. Her era was thick with conformity and with arguments about what respectable opinion looked like. The quote reads like a warning against moral branding: when tolerance becomes a self-congratulatory identity, it stops being a practice and starts being a way to control the room. The line’s elegance is that it indicts hypocrisy without preaching, letting the contradiction condemn itself.