“
Faced with endless religious warfare, Montaigne intuited that his best approach would be to tease his contemporaries away from intolerance. (Christians, he noted, were treating each other less kindly than Muslims, or even animals, did.) He could make toleration attractive not so much by argument as by a gentle mockery: the deflation of human pretensions in general and philosophical and religious ones in particular.
—The First Liberal — Kwame Anthony Appiah, Slate.com (h/t Joshua Safran)
.