Quotes About Dissent

It's funny how people who ain't never been down there can think that America is so fair and that we should be alright. It's funny that the people who have their foot on our neck are telling us, 'Get up. What's wrong with you?'

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

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

The pattern of praise and punishment is a familiar one throughout history: those who line up in the service of the state are typically praised by the general intellectual community, and those who refuse to line up in service of the state are punished.

The U.S. media do not function in the manner of the propaganda system of a totalitarian state. Rather, they permit indeed encourage spirited debate, criticism, and dissent, as long as these remain faithfully within the system of presuppositions and principles that constitute an elite consensus, a system so powerful as to be internalized largely without awareness

Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force—maybe even too critical for the health of democracy—when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system:

from 1960—remember the date—from 1960 to "the Soviet collapse in 1990, the numbers of political prisoners, torture victims, and executions of nonviolent political dissenters in Latin America vastly exceeded those in the Soviet Union and East European satellites.

The avant-garde in every field consists of the lonely, the friendless, the uninvited. All progress is the product of the unpopular.

But I don't want to go back. Not yet. Just because. Because every once in a while, somebody brings me my lunch tray and my meds and he has a black eye or his forehead is swollen with stitches, and he says: We miss you Mr. Durden. Or somebody with a broken nose pushes a mop past me and whispers: Everything's going according to the plan. Whispers We're going to break up civilization so we can make something better out of the world. Whispers We look forward to getting you back.

I refuse to give readers an uplifting faux experience engineered to comfort them and perpetuate the sociopolitical and economic status quo. Who died and made you Bertolt Brecht?

Naughty business, this Empire.

He was jailed for inciting riots that weren't riots but peaceful gatherings.

Hell, I never vote for anybody, I always vote against.

Estêvão Gomes, reassigned as the pilot of San Antonio, strongly dissented. Now that they had found

He's not a Republican, he's a Republican't.

A heretic is a man who sees with his own eyes.

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

There was certainly an improvement and any dissent or unrest was external – in the media and on radio phone-ins – rather than inside the dressing room. Some reactionary pundits even called for Pep's head.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.

I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use---silence, exile and cunning.

This dissent isn't going to suppress itself.

I can be unhappy with the Congress, but I cannot give up on its ideology.

Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.