Quotes About Dissent

the reprehensible presumption of individuals who attempted to think for themselves in matters connected with religion, or to be guided by their own interpretations of Scripture

We must treat arrest as the normal condition of the life of a non-co-operator.

In short, taken together, commanding right and forbidding wrong are very effective means of silencing dissent. They act as a grassroots system of religious vigilantism. And their most zealous enforcers find in these words an excuse not just to command and to forbid but also to threaten, to beat, and to kill.

In no other modern religion is dissent still a crime, punishable by death.

When George W. Bush was up for re-election, we took part in Rock Against Bush.

if you ask enough people, you'll find someone who will disagree with the majority and give those nervous about risk a way out.

There is no satisfaction in hanging a man who does not object to it.

The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.

Heresy is another word for freedom of thought.

You have to be careful how you're using the word boycott.

The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.

Living in Beijing, writing about politically sensitive things now and then, you get used to the idea that somebody, somewhere, might be watching. But it is usually an abstract threat.

Google has established a pattern of lobbying and threatening to acquire power. It has reached a dangerous point common to many monarchs: The moment where it no longer wants to allow dissent.

Liberation movements - operating surreptitiously and conspiratorially - thrive on discipline and suspicion, and punish deviation or dissent.

The Chinese government has been clear in its goal and purpose for creating and expanding Confucius Institutes throughout the country, namely to distort academic discourse on China, threaten and silence defenders of human rights, and create a climate intolerant of dissent or open discussion.

Free societies...are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom's existence.

I have always been an anarchist and a monarchist.

Black Sabbath wasn't like the Bon Jovis of the time. We were just a bunch of guys that were against the grain of society. And we sung about things that people thought back then.

One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.

Anarchists try to identify power structures. They urge those exercising power to justify themselves. This justification does not succeed most of the time.

True poetry ought to be secret and clandestine, concealed like a prohibited voice of dissent, while at the same time it should speak to everyone.

In Russia they put you in insane asylums if you disagree with the state: it's not so different here. Keep the natives quiet.

Hanoi's leaders were virtuoso songbirds of propaganda. They lived in a bubble. There were no voices of dissent in their society to check or challenge wishful thinking.

Modern 'liberalism' is strikingly illiberal; the high priests of 'tolerance' are increasingly intolerant of even the mildest dissent; and those who profess to 'celebrate diversity' coerce ever more ruthlessly a narrow homogeneity.