Success Quote by James Goldsmith

Goldsmith’s line reads like a warning label slapped onto liberal manners: handle with care, because the bottle next to “tolerance” on the shelf is labeled “don’t care” and “can’t act.” Coming from a businessman who built power in the high-stakes world of corporate takeovers and later plunged into anti-EU politics, the intent isn’t airy moral philosophy. It’s operational. He’s arguing that tolerating everything can become a management style for decline: a way to avoid conflict, delay decisions, and keep the peace while the ground shifts under you.

The craft is in the phrase “immediate neighbors.” It’s a spatial metaphor that turns a virtue into a precarious border town. Tolerance isn’t condemned outright; it’s positioned as unstable, easily annexed by less flattering traits. That’s the subtext: the problem isn’t tolerance as principle, but tolerance as posture - the kind that signals sophistication while quietly surrendering agency. “Apathy and weakness” aren’t moral failures so much as political outcomes: citizens who shrug, institutions that hesitate, leaders who outsource conviction to process.

Context matters because Goldsmith’s worldview prized sovereignty, leverage, and the ability to say no - whether to a boardroom opponent or a supranational bureaucracy. In that frame, tolerance becomes suspect when it functions as a substitute for boundaries. The line flatters decisiveness and treats moral restraint as something that must prove it can coexist with strength. It’s persuasive because it exploits a real anxiety: that civility can be weaponized into paralysis, and that the most comfortable virtues are the ones least likely to stop a slow-motion loss.