Challenging Authority Quotes

In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Follow the path of the unsafe, independent thinker. Expose your ideas to the danger of controversy. Speak your mind and fear less the label of 'crackpot' than the stigma of conformity.

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

I defy the Pope and all his laws. If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture, than he does.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

A radical is one who speaks the truth.

Governments have nothing. They can't create anything, they never have. All they can do is steal from one group and give it to another at the destruction of the principles of freedom, and we ought to challenge that concept.

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

There are always more people to prove wrong.

There is no democracy without dissent.

Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.

When in doubt, mock the powerful, not the powerless.

The proverb warns that 'You should not bite the hand that feeds you.' But maybe you should, if it prevents you from feeding yourself.

It is a fool's prerogative to utter truths that no one else will speak.

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.

While out on the perimeter, women discovered the freedom of badlands. They were curiously free to invent, without having to liberate themselves from the forms and rewards of the cultural norm.

We know that when people are civically engaged, when they understand what their rights are, when they understand that in a democracy you can challenge governments, you can challenge policymakers, and you can... actually shape and form future policy, I think it changes the perception that a lot of young people have about where power is.

Speaking truth to power is actually a form of loyalty.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it.

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

Growing up in New York with artist parents - a very liberal environment, where we were always encouraged to challenge the status quo - I think for a long time I confused jingoism with patriotism. And that is a mistake.

It's like, 'You're not allowed to change. That's not fair. We like you like this.' But I don't. So let me expand and express myself.