Quotes about Dissent

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Ulrike Meinhof

Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.

John Ralston Saul

Questioning is the great strength of democracy; the ability to doubt without losing face

Emma Goldman

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Russian Proverb

An enemy will agree, but a friend will argue.

Voltaire

It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong.

Wole Soyinka

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

Hubert Humphrey

Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.

Vladimir Lenin

Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes is right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns.

Vladimir Lenin

Rollo May

The opposite of courage in our society is not cowardice, it is conformity.

Kenneth Rexroth

Today we hear a great deal about Organizational Men, Mass Culture, Conformity, the Lonely Crowd, the Power Elite and its Conspiracy of Mediocrity. We forget that the very volume of this criticism is an indication that our society is still radically pluralistic. Not only are there plenty of exceptionalists who take exception to the stereotyping of the mass culture but that very string of epithets comes from a series of books that have been recent best-sellers, symptoms of a popular, living tradition of dissent from things as they are.

J. William Fulbright

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and to pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing.

Ari Melber

If you believe in democracy, you accept, by definition, the existence and triumph of opposing ideas. The people who believe deeply in the Internet's force as a commons operate on that kind of premise.

Samuel Butler

The more unpopular an opinion is, the more necessary is it that the holder should be somewhat punctilious in his observance of conventionalities generally.

Thomas Gray

When ignorance is bliss, / Tis folly to be wise.

This is the source of the proverb, “Ignorance is bliss.”

Sidney Hook

To silence criticism is to silence freedom.

Joseph Goebbels

The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of it's powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth becomes the greatest enemy of the State.

George Washington

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

Henrik Ibsen

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Abraham Foxman

I’ll defend your right to be a bigot.

As long as the bigotry took for form of speech, writing, and voting he was a defender even of anti-Semites. However, when that leads to violence or an infringement on other people’s rights, then the bigotry becomes criminal.

J. William Fulbright

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

Banksy

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

Henrik Ibsen

A minority may be right. The majority is always wrong.

Mark Twain

When your opinions start to coincide with those of the majority, it is time to reconsider your opinions.

Michel Foucault

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Everett Dirksen

Never has law and order been so disdained.

There were anti-Vietnam war protests going on throughout the country that year. In many of them, especially at universities, protesters took over buildings, and shut down operations. Most Republicans and many Democrats wanted the protests to end, mostly because they feared the spread of the anti-Vietnam war sentiment would catch on and become a position held by most Americans (which it did just as they feared,) They were restrained in what they could do legally by the 1st Amendment. However, there was much breaking of minor laws in many of the demonstrations and that was the focus of the effort to suppress the demonstrations. But in the tradition of civil disobedience, it was the lawbreaking that tended to get the press attention and coverage, so the leaders of the anti-war movement advocated even more lawbreaking, hence Dirksen’s statement to the convention.

Dissent Quotes