Dissent Quotes

See also Core English Vocabulary (D) Quotes

I feel quite strongly about anti-Americanism. I share people`s grievances about the current Administration but I remember my father and I watching the Watergate hearings. Here was a country arraigning its own leaders. America has a fantastic history of dissent. (Sept. 2007)

- Colin Firth

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police, but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder "censorship", we call it "concern for commercial viability."

- David Mamet

It`s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.

- Harold Pinter

(July 3, 2007) I believe that presidential pardon authority is available to any president, and almost all presidents have exercised it. This (the Libby decision) was clearly an effort to protect the White House. ... There isn`t any doubt now, what we know is that Libby was carrying out the implicit or explicit wishes of the vice president, or maybe the president as well, in the further effort to stifle dissent.

- Hillary Rodham Clinton

We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.

- Richard Perle

Unfortunately, 9/11 crystallized some misconceptions that made some people unable to realize that really healthy dissent is in truth more supportive of those poor soldiers being sent to get slaughtered than this blind allegiance to a certain political regime, ... It`s like the Earth is flat and we`re gonna walk off the edge of it. It causes me a certain amount of dismay. I realize that Americans are innocent -- only seven percent of our population even owns a passport. But man, I`ll tell you, I don`t think corporate America and the political regimes meet in an innocent place, and they don`t mind using the innocence of Americans in a greedy way.

- Rodney Crowell

It`s much easier to make jokes about sensitive issues if there is some dissent, some conflict.

- Mo Rocca

This indicates a wider culture of control and intolerance of dissent.

- David Clark

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

- Jacob Bronowski

Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.

- Jacob Bronowski

Throughout the lead-up to the war, CNN worked hard to air all sides of the story. We had a regular segment called Voices of Dissent in which we spent time covering antiwar protests and interviewing those who were opposed to the war with Iraq.

- Jim Walton

Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

- Howard Zinn

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

- Absalon

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

- Al Hubbard

In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

- Allison Janse

Neither with those nor with the others, with all I agree and dissent; in all part of truth and part of error must be seen.

- Amani Abeid Karume

Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.

- American Council

But by having a right to dissent and having institutions which protect that right, free societies also have mechanisms to correct those abuses.

- American Council

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

- American Council

Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.

- American Council

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

- American Council

While thousands are dying in Iraq, here at home our government is waging a new war, a `war on dissent` that threatens to dismantle the constitution and severely challenge our country`s basic democratic principles of free speech and peaceful assembly.

- Atiyyah Henderson

The `global warming` lobby hopes to stop all dissent by shutting out, shouting down and intimidating any opposition.

- Barbara Kelleher

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

- J. William Fulbright

Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change

- Will Durant

The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the Protestantism of the Protestant religion

- Edmund Burke

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows that from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas of freedom. Free society must fertilize the soil in which non-conformity and dissent and individualism can grow.

- Henry Steele Commager

In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.

- J. William Fulbright

You don`t need to be Catholic to be Catholic anymore. If you dissent, you don`t get out. Martin Luther looks like a prince compared to these people because he knew when it was time to go.

- James P. McFadden

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. 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 its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

- Joseph Goebbels