Quotes About Dissent

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

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Free speech means the right to shout 'theatre' in a crowded fire.

In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.

Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.

Dissent is the mark of freedom.

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.

Freedom to reject is the only freedom.

The only church that illuminates is a burning church.

Whatever it is, I'm against it.

Far from being a line of demarcation against Trump, January 6 would result in a rehabilitation of the former president that would propel a narrative of denial, lies, and autocratic intolerance of dissent that has become the hallmark of the GOP.

As historian Johanna Fernández writes in a study co-authored with political prisoner Abu-Jamal, "The deployment of hysteria around the issue of crime and the association of crime with black rebellion helped consolidate public support for legislation designed to suppress political dissent."[18]

In every circle of friends there's always that one person everyone secretly hates. Don't have one? Then it's probably you.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Heresy is just philosophy that the establishment doesn't approve of

In all societies, public rhetoric involves some measure of lying, and history -- political history and art history -- is made when someone effectively confronts the lie. But in really scary societies all public conversation is an exercise in using words to mean their opposites -- in describing the brave as traitorous , the weak as frightening , and the good as bad -- and confronting these lies is the most scary and lonely thing a person can do.

We manufactured fake dissent, to prevent real dissent.

An avid reader, he found himself agreeing with the former Soviet dissident turned Israeli political figure Natan Sharansky, whose The Case for Democracy (2004) distinguished between "free societies," where dissent flourished, and "fear societies," where unpopular opinions risked imprisonment and death.

Very few philosophers have been anarchists

The Nonconformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

To be an anti-Trump Republican in this climate requires moral courage that few politicians or media personalities display.

I've censored my true feelings more and more, replacing them with lies that I know everyone wants to hear. I've felt like I've lost my right to have an opinion, just because I know no one will back me up. But we should all have the courage to speak out about what's bothering us about this school and beyond. Maybe people won't like what you have to say. Perhaps you'll find that you're not alone.

But we need to search for and find, what we need to own and perfect into a magnificent, shining thing, is a new kind of politics. Not the politics of governments, but the politics of resistance. The politics of opposition. The politics of forcing accountability. The politics of slowing things down. In the present circumstances, I'd say the only thing worth globalizing is dissent.