Quotes About Dissent

Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. So instead of speaking to highly agreeable audiences, target suggestions to people with a history of originality.

There's not much place for the loyalists - especially the loyalists who left - in standard American history.

I think the most important idea is to remember that there have been times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal.

It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

It's not about going around trying to stir up trouble. As long as you're honest and you articulate what you believe to be true, somebody somewhere will become your enemy whether you like it or not.

'tis his honesty that brought upon him the character of a heretic.

I hope you're representing the devil's advocate.

And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.

When two or more people agree on an issue, I form on the other side.

Dissent is the mark of freedom, as originality is the mark of independence of mind. … No one can be a scientist … if he does not have independence of observation and of thought.

In economics, the majority is always wrong.

Never follow the crowd.

Think wrongly, if you please, but in all cases think for yourself.

The world is kept alive only by heretics.

Someday they'll give a war and nobody will come.

Such a lot is won when even a single man gets to his feet and says No

The only voice of dissent you have to dispel is your own.

Entrenched aristocracies, however we may want to define them, do not want change; their desire instead is to manage dissent in a way that does not disrupt their control. But over time, under the right system of government, a free, thinking people has the energy and ultimately the power to effect change.

Vietnam War was, to say the obvious, deeply controversial. One of its main dividing lines was whether a young American would step forward to serve or under what conditions he would find a way to stay here at home. It is beyond debate that many who opposed both the war and military service doubled down on their dissent by denigrating the value of serving and the morality of those who did the hardest fighting in the war.

Joining anything was not my usual thing- by a long shot... I don't know about you, but if 50 million people are doing something, I want to be doing something else- big time.

In the free world (Natopolis) the centres of ideological orthodoxy are rarely defined. The diversity of intellectual trends within the orthodoxy, the indeterminate and shifting character of its boundaries, the existence of real centres of dissent (and the licence given to even Stalinist opposition)--all these conspire to create the central illusion of Natopolitan culture, that there is in fact no orthodoxy but only an infinite variety of opinions among which one is free to choose.

In the context of a national dialogue, perhaps the only authorization required for "putting in your little two cents worth" is the constitutional provision for free speech. Moreover, the basis for the presumptions of dissent and counter-statement is the same as for popping off: the merest hint or suspicion that outrage is being committed against one's conception of actuality.

What does it mean to truly believe in America? To wave a flag? Or to struggle toward a more searching alternative to the shallowness of the flag-wavers - to criticize, to interrogate, to analyze, to dissent?

There are many ways of showing your protest and discontent without the actions of Kremlin.