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Daily Inspiration Quote by Bainbridge Colby

"We must stifle the voice of hatred and faction"

About this Quote

“We must stifle the voice of hatred and faction” is the kind of civic warning that sounds genteel until you notice the verb doing all the work. “Stifle” doesn’t mean rebut, outvote, or out-argue; it means suppress. Colby, a buttoned-up public servant who served briefly as Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state, is speaking from an era when elites often treated political discord as a kind of contagion: something to be quarantined for the health of the republic.

The line’s intent is stabilizing. It tries to pull the listener toward a higher loyalty than party, ethnicity, or ideology. “Hatred” is the obvious villain, but “faction” is the tell. In the American tradition, faction is a founding-era fear (Madison’s nightmare) and a convenient label for any movement that threatens consensus. Colby’s phrasing asks you to imagine that the nation has one legitimate voice, and that deviation isn’t just wrong but dangerous.

The subtext is both aspirational and controlling: unity is framed as a moral duty, while dissent is blurred into malice. That ambiguity matters in context. Colby lived through the Red Scare, labor unrest, anti-immigrant nativism, and a postwar crackdown on radicals and “un-American” speech. In that climate, calls to quiet “hatred” could easily double as permission slips to silence unpopular politics.

Rhetorically, the sentence works because it’s emotionally satisfying: it promises relief from conflict. Its risk is that the cure can resemble the disease, trading open argument for enforced calm.

Quote Details

TopicPeace
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Citation Formats

APA Style (7th ed.)
Colby, Bainbridge. (n.d.). We must stifle the voice of hatred and faction. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-stifle-the-voice-of-hatred-and-faction-139085/

Chicago Style
Colby, Bainbridge. "We must stifle the voice of hatred and faction." FixQuotes. Accessed February 3, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-stifle-the-voice-of-hatred-and-faction-139085/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"We must stifle the voice of hatred and faction." FixQuotes, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/we-must-stifle-the-voice-of-hatred-and-faction-139085/. Accessed 3 Feb. 2026.

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Stifling Hatred and Division for Unity
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About the Author

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Bainbridge Colby (December 22, 1869 - April 11, 1950) was a Public Servant from USA.

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