Quotes About Dissent

Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.

In addition to removing our democratically elected government, Israel wants to sow dissent among Palestinians by claiming that there is a serious leadership rivalry among us. I am compelled to dispel this notion definitively.

Whenever I see that kind of story, where everybody agrees, I know there's something wrong.

If you are creative, you must be dissident.

I've had enough of organizations for a while, no matter how good the cause. I prefer being a free-agent rabble-rouser. Dan

I did not like war, even when it was the popular thing to do.

There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.

Lies are considered true. Truth is considered seditious.

Violence in America is not restricted to state violence. There is a tradition of vigilante violence that is used, usually with the state's tacit if unofficial blessing, to crush dissent, to keep repressed minorities in a state of fear, or to exact revenge on those the state has branded as traitors. It is a product of hatred, not hope. It is directed against the weak, not the strong. And it is deeply ingrained in the American psyche.

Paine posited that the self-professed virtuous people would smash the windows of the actual Christian God if God ever lived on earth.42

The first step to stringing the boss up from a lamppost is saying the boss is a moron.

it is not enough to tolerate dissent: sometimes you have to demand it. Galvin

the disposition to disagree, to reject and to dissent—however irritating it may be when taken to extremes—is the very lifeblood of an open society. We need people who make a virtue of opposing mainstream opinion.

Dissent and dissidence are overwhelmingly the work of the young. It is not by chance that the men and women who initiated the French Revolution, like the reformers and planners of the New Deal and postwar Europe, were distinctly younger than those who had gone before. Rather than resign themselves, young people are more likely to look at a problem and demand that it be solved.

It is tempting to conform: community life is a lot easier where everyone appears to agree with everyone else, and where dissent is blunted by the conventions of compromise.

Marxism was the rhetorical awning under which very different dissenting styles could be gathered together—not least because it offered an illusory continuity with an earlier radical generation. But under that awning, and served by that illusion, the Left fragmented and lost all sense of shared purpose.

for every expert there is an equal and opposite anti-expert.

Groupthink can also happen when a fixed-mindset leader punishes dissent. People may not stop thinking critically, but they stop speaking up.

There are so many ways the fixed mindset creates groupthink. Leaders are seen as gods who never err. A group invests itself with special talents and powers. Leaders, to bolster their ego, suppress dissent. Or workers, seeking validation from leaders, fall into line behind them.

There is a commonplace book argument, Which glibly glides from every vulgar tongue When any dare a new light to present: 'If you are right, then everybody's wrong.' Suppose the converse of this precedent So often urged, so loudly and so long: 'If you are wrong, then everybody's right.' Was ever everybody yet so quite?

There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war.

People didn't have the political guts to stand up against an American war.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.