Dissent Quotes

The fundamentalist mind, running in a single rut for fifty years, is now quite unable to comprehend dissent from its basic superstitions, or to grant any common honesty, or even any decency, to those who reject them.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.

People who set up repressive machinery always think it’s going to be directed against the Bad Guys (whoever they think the Bad Guys are) and never against themselves.

Every day the airwaves are filled with warnings, veiled and unveiled threats, spewed invective and hatred directed at any voice of dissent. And the public, like so many relatives and friends that I saw this weekend, sit in mute opposition and in fear. I’m sick of hearing about Hollywood being against the war. Hollywood’s heavy […]

Our ability to disagree, and our inherent right to question our leaders and criticize their actions define who we are. To allow those rights to be taken away out of fear, to punish people for their beliefs, to limit access in the news media to differing opinions is to acknowledge our democracy’s defeat. These are […]

Now, when people like Sen. Daschle stand up in the Senate and attack the president one day before the war starts, then that, to me, borders on lack of patriotism and I think it is wrong… there are people… who have got so much money they feel ashamed of it and they hate America… They […]

How can we pay attention to this spoiled, affluent, bored, rock-throwing generation who only want to tear down America without offering any solutions? Sometimes I have just spent 40 minutes in a taxi trying to get through the 15 blocks to the TV host who has asked the question. I wonder from whom we should […]

To respect Louis Farrakhan, we must understand, is simply to agree with him… If dissent is now also to be thought of as a form of ‘dissing,’ then we have indeed succumbed to the thought police.

No dissenter rides in his coach for three generations; he infallibly falls into the Establishment.

Many a man will have the courage to die gallantly, but will not have the courage to say, or even to think, that the cause for which he is asked to die is an unworthy one. Obloquy is, to most men, more painful than death; that is one reason why, in times of collective excitement, […]