Quotes About Dissidents

You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.

The historical origins of today's enormously expanded mass incarceration system lie in the ways U.S. state power responded to black and other dissidents in the 1960s and 1970s. The frenzy of concern with such dissidents prompted key state leaders to target entire racialized communities from which dissidents might come. To

Nullifying or "neutralizing" the work and effects of such dissidents and organizers of alternative social structures is a third way that carceral state terror protects a system of economic disparity.

Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.

In Britain today friends of mine live like dissidents in a dictatorship. They meet in secret. They vet new arrivals to ensure they are not spies. They are ex-Muslims living in a supposedly free country who fear their enemies will damn them as apostates and kill them. How extraordinary that they must hide their true beliefs from all but intimate friends for fear of the consequences. And how shameful that they have no anti-fascist Left worthy of the name to defend them.