Quotes About Dissent

It is better to be the thorn in the side of your friend than his echo

Good men must not obey the laws too well.

So few want to be rebels anymore. And out of those few, most, like myself, scare easily.

When I reread it as a teenager, Fahrenheit 451 had become a book about independence, about thinking for yourself. It was about treasuring books and the dissent inside the covers of books. It was about how we as humans begin by burning books and end by burning people.

Under Colonel Korn's rule, the only people permitted to ask questions were those who never did. Soon the only people attending were those who never asked questions, and the sessions were discontinued altogether, since Clevinger, the corporal and Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

Fuck my superiors,' I decided, when I saw that most of my superiors were not superior. Years later I read where Camus said that the only freedom we have is the freedom to say no. You ever read Camus?

Why,' swore Yossarian at him approvingly, 'you evil-eyed, mechanically-aptituded, disaffiliated son of a -----, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?' 'I didn't,' Orr said, 'walk around with anything in my cheeks. I walked around with crab apples in my cheeks. When I couldn't get crab apples, I walked around with horse chestnuts. In my cheeks.

Why," swore Yossarian at him approvingly, "you evil-eyed, mechanicallyaptituded, disaffiliated son of a bitch, did you walk around with anything in your cheeks?

Colonel Korn agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

Yossarian nodded and listened to Milo tell him that the decent thing to do if he did not like the way Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn were running the group was to go to Russia, instead of stirring up trouble. Yossarian refrained from pointing out that Colonel Cathcart, Colonel Korn, and Milo could all go to Russia if they did not like the way he was stirring up trouble.

The task thus becomes to track the patterned ways that violence seeks to name as violent that which resists it, and how the violent character of a legal regime is exposed as it forcibly quells dissent, punishes workers who refuse the exploitative terms of contracts, sequesters minorities, imprisons its critics, and expels its potential rivals.

Reeducation comes from voices that dissent from the unexamined comfort zone, from those who abrasively shock our comfort zones with voices from outside that violate the consensus that has been silently accepted.

A totalizing regime cannot tolerate dissent or subversion. Thus, as is necessary, totalizing regimes must silence dissent, must prohibit subversion, must control artists, must banish poets, and when necessary must kill prophets.

subversives in the face of totalism have always had to speak twice in the same utterance, once for the official record and once for the truth of bodily reality.

Given the nearly unrestricted power of lawmaking and taxation, they ensure that actual dissent is nearly nonexistent. Every citizen has become a federal lawbreaker and we are suffocated under a tax code that few have actually read and no one fully understands. Like the Sword of Damocles, federal retribution hangs over the heads of everyone, waiting to impale anyone who steps out of line.

Corporations took our innate impulse toward dissent and our desire for meaningful change, and transmuted them into effective sales tools for their products.

Does it even need to be said that there are times when one must stand up to the community, and use one's voice in support of an unpopular view? Or that complicity is participation? Sometimes the issue at hand may concern a gross injustice, sometimes it may just be about individual boundaries. Sometimes a dissenting view will be heard and accepted, sometimes it will be ignored. None of this changes our obligation to move through the world with honesty and bravery.

Only Kowalski voiced a dissent. "C'mon, guys. Does that really sound like a place we want to go?

Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else?

For years I have been crouching in corners hissing small and ladylike anathema of Theodore Dreiser.

Kibbencook was not a hotbed of radicalism, and even antiwar marches were organized with a certain decorum. It was a thoroughly suburban protest.

Because a rebel is just a guy who doesn't have the good sense to go the same way the crowd is going, and the composure to act like that was his idea all along.

Peter Thiel and I disagree on 99 percent of things.

Dissent is as American as cherry pie.