Quotes About Dissent

My problem has always been with authority, and I'm sure if anybody understands that, it's people in uniform.

The people that were most interesting were always questioning the status quo.

We're a band that's never been okay with the status quo. In a way, it's allowed us to be more open and confrontational in our music.

As Orwell once wrote, "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear"—most especially, for him, facts that they did not want to acknowledge.

For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly.

raise less corn and more hell.

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion

so bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can't join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for....

It has happened, that all the answers that I have seen to the former part of 'The Age of Reason' have been written by priests: and these pious men, like their predecessors, contend and wrangle, and understand the Bible; each understands it differently, but each understands it best; and they have agreed in nothing but in telling their readers that Thomas Paine understands it not .

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church. All

I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust…We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.

And on the war, I think my numbers would be a lot higher if I were out there beating the drum for this war. In fact, I don't think it, I know it. But I can't be for the war.

I have, on several occasions, disagreed with decisions of Justice Souter.

If this is the way Queen Victoria treats her prisoners, she doesn't deserve to have any.

where he might variously be called a terrorist or a martyr or a murderer or a guerrilla or a freedom fighter

In some corner of the world they are probably still holding regular meetings of the Flat Earth Society. We derive no comfort because important people, vocal people, or great numbers of people agree with us. Nor do we derive comfort if they don't.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the leading liberal voice of dissent on the modern Supreme Court. But she arguably made her most profound mark on the law before becoming a judge, as a pioneer for women's rights. Put simply, she changed the way the world is for American women.

The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.

In the run-up to the election, Stephen Harper had rolled out the rhetoric on the need for clean and transparent government, expressing frustration with Paul Martin's Liberals over their alleged secrecy and obstructionism. "When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent," Harper declared in a statement to be later viewed as notable for ironic content, "Is frankly when it is rapidly losing its moral authority to govern.

Everyone who is not happy must be shot.

following the herd was not a good thing, that it was a terrible thing to do

The only time I've seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep.

To be a heretic to-day is almost a human obligation.

I believe to go along to get along is unpatriotic. I believe that agreeing with your government on everything they do is unpatriotic. I believe a patriot stands up and holds your government's feet to the fire. Because if you do that, you will get good government.