Quotes About Dissent

I went to jail for 11 days for disturbing the peace; I was trying to disturb the war.

Anne Applebaum

The more powerful the group to which we belong, the less likely, generally, we are to question the system that legitimises and confers these privileges.

Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise's culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it's really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we're all guilty of it; and we don't even notice that we're doing it.

The modern progressive movement believes that dissenting language is objectionable, which then removes the brakes between anger and violence.

You know, this entire industry, and its not just this industry, it's most people in media, come from one point of view. One. And I am making you a promise on that one. And there is one of me, and they can't stand that there is one dissenting voice. They can only indict my motives.

We advised them to do what they think proper against the war.

Boycott is a perfectly legitimate form of democratic protest.

There is a right to protest in our country, but at times the manner in which the protest is done breaks all permissible levels. I don't agree with it at all.

As an American, you have the right to protest me or another individual or a group, but I believe that protesting the United States for the mistakes it has made - when it gave you the freedom to do so in the first place - is disrespectful.

To me, protesting and playing music go hand in hand.

I was involved in some peaceful protests.

It does not prove a thing to be right because the majority say it is so.

I cultivate hatred of action like a greenhouse flower. I dissent from life and am proud of it.

I'm against fashionable thinking.

The harshest thing I can say is I was married to someone for whom all dissent was abuse. If you had your own opinion, you were abusive.

The United States is in a time of transition. Courts have redefined marriage, and beliefs about human sexuality are changing. Will the right to dissent be protected? Will the right of Americans to speak and act in accord with what the United States had always believed about marriage - that it's a union of husband and wife - be tolerated?

In the 20th century, imprisonment of writers practically comes with the territory.

We are expected to believe that anyone who objects to the Department of Homeland Security or the USA Patriot Act is a terrorist, and that the only way to preserve our freedom is to hand it over to the government for safekeeping.

It's never a good thing to see a government agency talk in secret about the need to 'control protestors' - especially when that agency is charged with protecting the homeland against terrorists, not nonviolent demonstrators exercising their First Amendment rights to peaceable dissent.

We were marching since we were babies and all we did was make Jane Fonda famous.

So I ended up being an anarchist. I was the only anarchist I knew and thank god, because otherwise I would have stopped being an anarchist. Unanimity pisses me off immensely.

The low point of his presidency came in June and July 1798. While Adams wrestled with Hamilton over the ranking of Washington's major generals, Congress enacted four infamous laws designed to muzzle dissent and browbeat the Republicans into submission. They were known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act, passed on June 18, lengthened from five to fourteen years the period necessary to become a naturalized citizen with full voting rights.

All the pent-up frustrations produced by the accelerated change of the late nineteenth century were vented in spontaneous, often violent dissent.