Thursday, November 24, 2005

Bigotry

A nice quote (from Terry Teachout's About Last Night):

"Bigotry does not mean believing that people who differ from you are wrong, it means assuming that they are either knaves or fools. To think them so is an immediate convenience, since it saves us the trouble of analyzing either their views or our own. ‘Christians are right, pagans are wrong,’ says the Song of Roland. If we have to answer the other people and find that we can’t, then our bigotry grows more intense. It can turn to hatred: and one can reach the lowest point of all—measuring our loyalty to our own cause by our hatred of theirs.”

Frank Sheed, The Church and I

No comments: