Quotes About Resistance

Protest can be organized through social media, but nothing is real that does not end on the streets. If tyrants feel no consequences for their actions in the three-dimensional world, nothing will change.

Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defeat. Thus any problem in the Soviet Union could be defined as an example of enemy action, and enemy action could be defined as evidence of progress. P. 41

He places the sign in his window so that he can withdraw into daily life without trouble from the authorities. When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.

Make new friends and march with them. For resistance to succeed, two boundaries must be crossed. First, ideas about change must engage people of various backgrounds who do not agree about everything. Second, people must find themselves in places that are not their homes, and among groups who were not previously their friends.

For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so. James Madison nicely made the point that tyranny arises "on some favorable emergency.

For tyrants, the lesson of the Reichstag fire is that one moment of shock enables an eternity of submission. For us, the lesson is that our natural fear and grief must not enable the destruction of our institutions. Courage does not mean not fearing, or not grieving. It does mean recognizing and resisting terror management right away, from the moment of the attack, precisely when it seems most difficult to do so.

The path of least resistance leads directly from inevitability to eternity. If you once believed that everything always turns out well in the end, you can be persuaded that nothing turns out well in the end. If you once did nothing because you thought progress is inevitable, then you can continue to do nothing because you think time moves in repeating cycles.

Anticipatory obedience is a political tragedy

Churchill did what others had not done. Rather than concede in advance, he forced Hitler to change his plans.

salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one.

Sometimes institutions are deprived of vitality and function, turned into a simulacrum of what they once were, so that they gird the new order rather than resisting it. This is what the Nazis called Gleichschaltung.

salami tactics—slicing off layers of opposition one by one. Most people were distracted, some were imprisoned, and others were outmatched.

Crucially, though, the peasants had few guns, and poor organization.

If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

Ionesco's aim was to help us see just how bizarre propaganda actually is, but how normal it seems to those who yield to it. By using the absurd image of the rhinoceros, Ionesco was trying to shock people into noticing the strangeness of what was actually happening.

Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

When everyone else follows the same logic, the public sphere is covered with signs of loyalty, and resistance becomes unthinkable.

One novel known by millions of young Americans that offers an account of tyranny and resistance is J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

A] history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived.

This book is an attempt to begin that process by highlighting the critical contribution of SRT to an understanding of capitalist social relations.

It's the hunger; the hunger for an alternative and the refusal to accept a life of unhappiness...

The fight against colonialism is a fight to recognize the universal equality and freedom that colonialism renders invisible. It is not a fight to preserve the particularity of a local culture that European colonialism wiped out.

Art becomes an experience rather than a text that one interprets, and an experience resists universalization.

One of the characteristics of the mind is that it is always expecting something, chasing after something it wants or retreating from or resisting something is doesn't want.