Dissent Quotes

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

“I do this real moron thing, and it's called thinking. And apparently I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions.”
― George Carlin

“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci

“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
― Desmond Tutu (Foreword)

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
― Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV

“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
― James Baldwin

“In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot.”
― Czesław Miłosz

“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social enviroment. Most people are incapable of forming such opinions."

(Essay to Leo Baeck, 1953)”
― Albert Einstein

“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.”
― Kurt Cobain

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."

[Special Message to the Congress on the Internal Security of the United States, August 8, 1950]”
― Harry S. Truman

“Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.”
― Howard Zinn

“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
― Edward Abbey

“If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.”
― Albert Einstein

“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
― Galileo Galilei

“Inevitably it follows that anyone with an independent mind must become 'one who resists or opposes an authority or established convention': a rebel. ...And if enough people come to agree with—and follow—the REBEL, we now have a DEVIL. Until, of course, still more people agree. And then, finally, we have ... GREATNESS.”
― Nicholas Tharcher, Rebels & Devils; A Tribute to Christopher S. Hyatt

“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
― Frederick Douglass

“...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”
― Richard Dawkins

“An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein

“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
― St. Catherine of Siena

“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”
― Albert Einstein