Dissent Quotes
68 quotes
"Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth."
"I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions."
"The duty of youth is to challenge corruption."
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)"
"In a room wherepeople unanimously maintaina conspiracy of silence,one word of truthsounds like a pistol shot."
"Inevitably it follows that anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes an authority or established convention': a rebel. ...And if enough people come to agree with—and follow—the REBEL, we now have a DEVIL. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have ... GREATNESS."
"...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."
"A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth."
"If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it."
"There is absolutely no greater high than challenging the power structure as a nobody, giving it your all, and winning!"
"If you believe in your heart that you are right, then you must fight with all your might to do it your way. Only dead fish swim with the stream all the time."
"God remains silent so that men and women may speak, protest, and struggle. God remains silent so that people may really become people. When God is silent and men and women cry, God cries in solidarity with them but doesn't intervene. God waits for the shouts of protest."
"A leader should always be open to criticism, not silencing dissent. Any leader who does not tolerate criticism from the public is afraid of their dirty hands to be revealed under heavy light. And such a leader is dangerous, because they only feel secure in the darkness. Only a leader who is free from corruption welcomes scrutiny; for scrutiny allows a good leader to be an even greater leader."
"In an average day, you may well be confronted with some species of bullying or bigotry, or some ill-phrased appeal to the general will, or some petty abuse of authority. If you have a political loyalty, you may be offered a shady reason for agreeing to a lie or a half-truth that serves some short-term purpose. Everybody devises tactics for getting through such moments; try behaving "as if" they need not be tolerated and are not inevitable."
"Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear."
"Goldstone has done terrible damage to the cause of truth and justice and the rule of law. He has poisoned Jewish-Palestinian relations, undermined the courageous work of Israeli dissenters and—most unforgivably—increased the risk of another merciless IDF assault."
Norman G. Finkelstein, Goldstone Recants: Richard Goldstone Renews Israel's License to Kill
"In our native terms, the ironic style is often compounded with the sardonic and the hard-boiled; even the effortlessly superior. But irony originates in the glance and the shrug of the loser, the outsider, the despised minority. It is a nuance that comes most effortlessly to the oppressed."
Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
"You can control the visibility of my name and my popularity, but you cannot control the frequency at which people are quoting me. Truth always rises with time."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"In case of dissension, never dare to judge till you've heard the other side."
"We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree."
"When...did it become irrational to dislike religion, any religion, even to dislike it vehemently? When did reason get redescribed as unreason? When were the fairy stories of the superstitious placed above criticism, beyond satire? A religion was not a race. It was an idea, and ideas stood (or fell) because they were strong enough (or too weak) to withstand criticism, not because they were shielded from it. Strong ideas welcomed dissent."
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions.", 1953)"
"Truth is the preferred weapon of God, and censorship is the most abused tool of the Devil."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"Our freedoms are vanishing. If you do not get active to take a stand now against all that is wrong while we still can, then maybe one of your children may elect to do so in the future, when it will be far more riskier — and much, much harder."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des AndersdenkendenFreedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently."
"Censorship is alive and well in America."
Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
"An Act of Dissent is simply a way of saying, 'No, I do not accept this and, as my silence may be construed as acquiescence, I would like to make a small gesture to indicate that you can all go fuck yourselves."
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in"
"What do you mean by sound government?'Good public order, no corruption in high places, freedom from fear and war and crime, a reasonably equitable distribution of wealth and resources, concern for the individual life.'Then we haven't got sound government."
"Whether for good or for bad, the Iran that ultimately rises out of the ashes of last summer's uprising will be unlike the Iran we know today, and for that we can thank the Green Movement, not another round of useless sanctions."
"One of the juiciest pleasures of life is to be able to salute and embrace, as elected leaders and honored representatives, people whom you first met when they were on the run or in exile or (like Adam) in and out of jail. I was to have this experience again, and I hope to have it many more times in the future: it sometimes allows me to feel that life is full of point."
"Men and women...sill live together for centuries without agreeing on anything."
"Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo."
"Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment."
"Nevertheless, what was made in the hope of transforming the world need not be rejected because it failed to do so – otherwise, one would also have to throw out a good deal of the greatest painting and poetry of the nineteenth century. An objective political failure can still work as a model of intellectual affirmation or dissent."
"Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."
"Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent."
David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?
"Let your dissent fuel you, your anger inspire you, your rage convey you, and your fury strike a chilling fear onto the spines of your enemies."
"My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself We need more dissent and less dogma."
"Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opin"
"The forces of piety have always and everywhere been the sworn enemy of the open mind and the open book."
"If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins make us seem harmless."
"Don't exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought."
"To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one could help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong."
"Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive."
"Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent"
"Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent."
"Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy."
"They're called 'facts', and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don't care at all what you think of my motives."
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