31 Quotes About Pluralism

Minorities are always better off in a culture which protects dissent than in a culture which protects us from dissent.

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance — it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

Moderation may be particularly relevant in a post-Cold War age such as ours because it enables us to deal with the antinomies and tensions at the heart of our contemporary societies and allows us to defend the pluralism of ideas, principles, and interests against its enemies. ... Moderation should be regarded as an eclectic virtue transcending the conventional categories of our political vocabulary.

To respect the opinions of those who stand against you is nothing short of courageous.

Tolerance is the price we pay for living in a free, pluralistic society.

Evangelicals have squandered their cultural capital because they have tried to reclaim a standing in American culture that they never had. The American Founding was a mix of fragmented religious (and not-so-religious) voices.

There is no clump called “I” moving from this spot to that spot, instant by instant. Rather, through particular encounters with particular people, within each encounter, within each transition, something called “I” makes its appearance. Thus it is that what seems to be an object outside yourself is, in reality, your complement, that which gives this instant of your life its glow.

But a society in which pluralism is not undergirded by some shared values and held together by some measure of mutual trust simply cannot survive. Pluralism that reflects no commitments whatever to the common good is pluralism gone berserk... ..Leaders unwilling to seek mutually workable arrangements within systems to their own are not surviving the long-term interest of their constituents

Up is infinite. Down is infinite. Pantheism, dualism, pluralism!