Quotes About Dissidence

Through the inspiration of Vaclav's words, the courage of his dissidence and the integrity of his leadership, Czechoslovakia successfully transitioned from an authoritarian state to a free democracy at the heart of Europe.

Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence.

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion.

Cultiv oroarea mea fa?? de acÅ£iune ca pe o plant? de ser?.M? felicit pe mine însumi pentru disidenÅ£a mea fa?? de via??.

Cultivo el odio por la acción como una flor de invernadero. Presumo ante mí mismo de la propia disidencia mía de la vida.

In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hardwired.

I would count myself as a friend of Vaclav Havel.

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks.

Lord, what you call compassion, others call weakness. What you call conviction, others call dissidence. What you call love, others call mixing with sinners. We pray that we too might be found weak, dissident, and in bad company, especially if it means we are closer to you. Amen.

El capitalismo es detestable. El comunismo es peor. El capitalismo te permite a un tiempo llevar vida de capitalista y renegar del capitalismo, mientras que el comunismo es por principio incompatible con cualquier forma de disidencia.

Gertrude Stein remarked that one writes for oneself and for strangers, which I translate as speaking both to myself (which is what great poetry teaches us how to do) and to those dissident readers around the world who in solitude instinctually reach out for quality in literature, disdaining the lemmings who devour J. K. Rowling and Stephen King as they race down the cliffs to intellectual suicide in the gray ocean of the Internet.

The rule of law that China's dissidents ask for is important to U.S. businesses investing in China as well.

If Chomsky says the educational system is an undemocratic system, you can say, well, you're there, you have a position at MIT. Well, it's perfectly attuned to the American system of control, a very sophisticated system of control that allows just enough dissidence so that those in power can point to the fact that the university is democratic but not enough dissidence to create a real danger to the system.

Pretty much anybody who does creative work in China navigates the gray zone. People aren't clear about where the line is any more, beyond which life gets really nasty and you become a dissident without having intended ever to be one.

When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.

No tempest at sea is harder on a man than to stand alone encircled by a firing squad of international authorities. A firm conviction of being in the right becomes your only armor against the barrage of assaults that can often be both personal and unfair. Yet dissidence and controversy are what bring science forward. Agreement and acceptance rarely stimulate experiments and progress.

The workers, once the heroes of historical negativity, have become the transparent unemployed workforce of factories that are but simulacra. The intellectual, once the herald of historical negativity, has become the transparent clown of dissidence.

You do not become a 'dissident' just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances….It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.

To be black is to be a dissident.

Through the inspiration of Vaclav's words, the courage of his dissidence and the integrity of his leadership, Czechoslovakia successfully transitioned from an authoritarian state to a free democracy at the heart of Europe.