Quote About Tolerance and Intelligent People is Misattributed to Dostoevsky
The Claim
Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky said or wrote: “Tolerance will reach such a level that intelligent people will be banned from thinking so as not to offend the imbeciles.”
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Emerging story
Posts attributing this quote to Dostoevsky began circulating on social media in July 2021.
Misbar’s Analysis
We found no evidence that Dostoevsky ever said or wrote this particular quote. Dostoyevsky, a 19th-century Russian novelist, wrote several famous works, including Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground. The novelist had a profound influence on a number of fields including literary criticism, theology, psychology, literary modernism, and literary existentialism.
While there are many famous quotes that can be attributed to Dostoevsky, this is not one of them. The same quote first appeared years earlier on social media sites with Russian text. Early versions started popping up in 2019 and didn’t include any attribution.
A Reddit thread from 2019 asked native Russian speakers to translate the quote into English without ever mentioning the famous Russian novelist. In 2021, the quote resurfaced in English and began including the false attribution to Dostoevsky.
