Daily Inspiration Quote by Sidney Hook

Hook is drawing a hard border around a word that often gets sold as softness. His line is a rebuttal to the feel-good idea that a tolerant society should simply "let everyone be", even when some of those "everyone"s are organizing to end tolerance itself. The sentence works because it flips tolerance from a personality trait into a political technology: a system for keeping a pluralistic public life possible. Systems have failure modes, and Hook is naming one.

The subtext is strategic, not sentimental. If tolerance is unlimited, it becomes a loophole: extremists can exploit open institutions, then close them behind them. Hook’s phrasing "actively intolerant" matters. He’s not saying people with unpopular beliefs should be banished; he’s targeting movements that translate intolerance into action: intimidation, coercion, disenfranchisement, violence, suppression of speech and association. In that sense, the "limit" is less about policing thoughts than about preventing the dismantling of the conditions that allow disagreement to stay civil.

Context sharpens the intent. Writing in the shadow of fascism and Stalinism, Hook was preoccupied with how liberal democracies can commit suicide by procedure, letting anti-democratic forces use democratic freedoms as a ladder. His argument also anticipates a perennial culture-war trap: treating neutrality as virtue even when neutrality functions as complicity. The sentence is an attempt to rescue tolerance from becoming a moral vanity project. It insists that defending openness sometimes requires exclusion - not of difference, but of domination.