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|  Samuel Adams | And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions. | |
| Carl Friedrich Bahrdt | The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes. | |
| Mikhail A. Bakunin | The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights. | |
| Alan Barth | Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works. | |
| Saul Bellow | Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | What finally emerges from the ‘clear and present danger’ cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished…It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow. | |
| Justice Hugo L. Black | An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment. | |
| William E. Borah | No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right. | |
| Justice Louis D. Brandeis | The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees. | |
| James Buchanan | I like the noise of democracy. | |
| Alan Bullock | No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance. | |
| Edmund Burke | He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. | |
| Pablo Casals | Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it. | |
| Zechariah Chafee, Jr. | You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time. | |
| Edmund B. Chaffee | The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings. | |
| William Kingdon Clifford | All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Jean Baptiste Colbert | The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion... In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience. | |
| Henry Steele Commager | Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. | |
| Pat Condell | Nobody should be compelled to respect an ideology that doesn’t respect them. | |
| Benjamin Constant | No duty, however, binds us to these so-called laws, whose corrupting influence menaces what is noblest in our being... | |
| Marvin Cooley | We must pity the poor wretched, timid soul who is too faint-hearted to resist his oppressors. He sings the song of the dammed: “I can’t fight back; I have too much to lose; I own too much property; I have worked too hard to get what I have; They will put me out of business if I resist; I might go to jail; I have my family to think about.” Such poor miserable creatures have misplaced values and are hiding their cowardice behind pretended family responsibility -- blindly refusing to see that the most glorious legacy that one can bequeath to posterity is liberty; and that the only true security is liberty. | |
| e. e. cummings | To be nobody but yourself -- in a world which is doing it's best, night and day, to make you like everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | There is no such crime as a crime of thought; there are only crimes of action. | |
| Clarence S. Darrow | The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along. | |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. | |
| Eugene Debs | Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free. | |
| Declaration of Independence | But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. | |
| Alan Dershowitz | Imagine a legal system in which lawyers were equated with the clients they defended and were condemned for representing controversial or despised clients. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | Freedom includes the right to say what others may object to and resent…The essence of citizenship is to be tolerant of strong and provocative words. | |
| John G. Diefenbaker | I am a Canadian, free to speak without fear, free to worship in my own way, free to stand for what I think right, free to oppose what I believe wrong, or free to choose those who shall govern my country. This heritage of freedom I pledge to uphold for myself and all mankind. | |
| William O. Douglas | The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| William O. Douglas | The great and invigorating influences in American life have been the unorthodox: the people who challenge an existing institution or way of life, or say and do things that make people think. | |
| Ronald Dworkin | ‘Balanced’ is a code for ‘denied’: a right to free speech that must be ‘balanced’ against so exhaustive a list of other supposed values means a right that can be exercised only when those in power judge that the speech in question is innocuous to them. | |
| Max Eastman | The real guarantee of freedom is an equilibrium of social forces in conflict, not the triumph of any one force. | |
| Thomas A. Edison | Restless is discontent and discontent is the first necessity of progress. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Every actual state is corrupt. Good men must not obey laws too well. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | Good men must not obey the laws too well. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | When you strike at a king, you must kill him. | |
| Hans Eysenck | If you admit that to silence your opponent by force is to win an intellectual argument, then you admit the right to silence people by force. | |
| Shelia Fitzpatrick | The mission of the Gestapo expanded steadily as, from 1933 onward, “political criminality” was given a much broader definition than ever before and most forms of dissent and criticism were gradually criminalized. The result was that more “laws” or lawlike measures were put on the books than ever. | |
| Abraham Flexner | We must not overlook the role that extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| E. M. Forster | Two cheers for democracy; one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. | |
| Abe Fortas | Procedure is the bone structure of a democratic society. Our scheme of law affords great latitude for dissent and opposition. It compels wide tolerance not only for their expression but also for the organization of people and forces to bring about the acceptance of the dissenter’s claim….We have alternatives to violence. | |
| Abe Fortas | Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent. And they must give it the respect and the latitude which they claim for themselves. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | Freedom of expression is the well-spring of our civilization...
The history of civilization is in considerable measure
the displacement of error which once held sway
as official truth by beliefs which in turn have yielded to other truths.
Therefore the liberty of man to search for truth
ought not to be fettered, no matter what orthodoxies he may challenge. | |
| John Kenneth Galbraith | These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland. | |
| Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi | Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good. | |
| James A. Garfield | I love agitation and investigation and glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error. | |
| Andre Gide | Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Samuel Gompers | The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong. | |
| Judge Learned Hand | Political agitation, by the passions it arouses or the convictions it engenders, may in fact stimulate men to the violation of the law. Detestation of existing politics is easily transformed into forcible resistance of the authority which puts them in execution... | |
| Judge Learned Hand | All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Oh, judge, your damn laws: the good people don't need them and the bad people don't follow them so what good are they? | |
| Ammon Hennacy | An anarchist is anyone who doesn't need a cop to tell him what to do. | |
| Ammon Hennacy | Force is the weapon of the weak. | |
| Eric Hoffer | It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority. | |
| Eric Hoffer | Freedom released the energies of the masses not by exhilarating but by unbalancing, irritating, and goading. | |
| Richard Hofstadter | A university’s essential character is that of being a center of free inquiry and criticism – a thing not to be sacrificed for anything else. | |
| Sidney Hook | To silence criticism is to silence freedom. | |
| Herbert Hoover | It [freedom] is a thing of the spirit. Men must be free to worship, to think, to hold opinions, to speak without fear. They must be free to challenge wrong and oppression with the surety of justice. | |
| Jacob G. Hornberger | The true patriot scrutinizes the actions of his own government with unceasing vigilance. And when his government violates the morality and rightness associated with principles of individual freedom and private property, he immediately rises in opposition to his government. | |
| James P. Hughes | The right to comment freely and criticize the action, opinions, and judgment of courts is of primary importance to the public generally. Not only is it good for the public; but it has a salutary effect on courts and judges as well. | |
| Hubert H. Humphrey | Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent and debate. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | What are the moral convictions most fondly held by barbarous and semi-barbarous people? They are the convictions that authority is the soundest basis of belief; that merit attaches to readiness to believe; that the doubting disposition is a bad one, and skepticism is a sin. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order. | |
| Justice Robert H. Jackson | Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only a unanimity at the graveyard. | |
| Jeff Jacoby | The First Amendment says nothing about a right not to be offended.
The risk of finding someone else's speech offensive
is the price each of us pays for our own free speech.
Free people don't run to court -- or to the principal --
when they encounter a message they don't like.
They answer it with one of their own. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | What country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. | |
| Jesus of Nazareth | Think not that I am come to send peace on earth:
I came not to send peace, but a sword.
For I am come to set a man at variance against his
father, and the daughter against her mother,
and the daughter in law against her mother in law.
And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. | |
| Gerald W. Johnson | We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear -- unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called 'the insolence of elected persons' -- in a word, free men. | |
| Howard Mumford Jones | Persecution is the first law of society because it is always easier to suppress criticism than to meet it. | |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well organized in his individuality as the mass itself. | |
| Franz Kafka | I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. | |
| Soren Kierkegaard | To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. To not dare is to lose oneself. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust ... is in reality expressing the highest respect for law ... We will not obey your evil laws. | |
| Judge Alex Kozinski | The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once. | |
| Paul Kurtz | Free inquiry entails recognition of civil liberties as integral to its pursuit, that is, a free press, freedom of communication, the right to organize opposition parties and to join voluntary associations, and freedom to cultivate and publish the fruits of scientific, philosophical, artistic, literary, moral and religious freedom. | |
| Karen Kwiatkowski | Farce, gross incompetence, and tragedy is the hallmark of big centralized government, wherever it develops. Big centralized government has developed in the United States year after year since the 1930s, and it has both solidified and metastasized since 9-11. Today, we live at the will and by the grace of a dystopian and grasping government. There is not an exceptional amount of time left before this government collapses, but before it does, we the people will suffer far more than we have suffered to date. Banking collapses, mortgage fraud at the highest levels, government bailouts, currency printing, and inflation in food and energy are just a foretaste of the future, led by the same Washington public-private cartel we have suffered for decades. . . .<br><br>
I believe our government -- outdated, unrestrained by the Constitution and soon to default on every debt it has taken on in our name -- cannot long endure. But unlike those who run and benefit from our modern American nationalism, corporatism and socialism, I do not fear average Americans seeking self-government, rule of law and liberty.<br><br>
That's why on Sept. 11, I will not be celebrating America's undeclared wars on countries that had nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks 10 years ago. I will not be attending remembrances of victims of that day, because those remembrances refuse to count American liberty, rule of law and freedom of trade and movement uppermost on that list of the sacrificed. I will not attend any program offered by a religious or political organization that seeks to ride a federal government bandwagon to confirm some imperative of war against Islam halfway around the world, or that seeks to promote the false concept of a culture war as somehow God's intent for America.<br><br>
On this 10-year anniversary, I intend to go about my business as usual, and say a prayer of gratitude for the small freedoms I have left. In the afternoon, I'll be in Charlottesville, Va., learning about local apprenticeship and crafts demonstrations. In the evening, I'll check the livestock and gather the eggs. I won't allow what I personally experienced that day in the Pentagon, nor the subsequent government drumbeats for war, waving the Sept. 11 banner, to diminish my awareness of the meaning of liberty.<br><br>
The real battle for Americans today is a battle to reassert our independence from an overbearing and unsustainable state. Today, we can all celebrate that there are fundamental cracks in the federal state's veneer, and we can be grateful for the options we still have in our own lives to live free, to practice charity and faith, creativity and productivity and to rediscover our own power as individuals and communities. | |
| D. H. Lawrence | Men are freest when they are most unconscious of freedom. The shout is a rattling of chains and always was. | |
| Paul F. Lazarsfeld | It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him. | |
| Pierre Lemieux | [R]evenues drive expenditures, not the inverse. ... tax evasion represents a net benefit to everybody ... A statue should be erected to the unknown tax evader. | |
| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin | We do not have time to play at “oppositions” at “conferences.” We will keep our political opponents... whether open or disguised as “nonparty,” in prison. | |
| Doris Lessing | Political correctness is the natural continuum from the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. | |
| Joseph Lewis | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| Sinclair Lewis | Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize. | |
| Georg Christoph Lichtenberg | One's first step in wisdom is to question everything -- and one's last is to come to terms with everything. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their Constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember it or overthrow it. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. | |
| Walter Lippmann | The opposition is indispensable. A good statesmen, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. | |
| John Locke | Any single man must judge for himself whether circumstances warrant obedience or resistance to the commands of the civil magistrate; we are all qualified, entitled, and morally obliged to evaluate the conduct of our rulers. This political judgment, moreover, is not simply or primarily a right, but like self-preservation, a duty to God. As such it is a judgment that men cannot part with according to the God of Nature. It is the first and foremost of our inalienable rights without which we can preserve no other. | |
| James Russell Lowell | Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold-bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of opinion. | |
| Rosa Luxemburg | Without general elections, without unrestrained freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution…in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. | |
| Archibald Macleish | The dissenter is every human being at those times of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. | |
| Thomas Mann | It is impossible for ideas to compete in the marketplace if no forum for their presentation is provided or available. | |
| Jose Marti y Perez | Only oppression should fear the full exercise of freedom. | |
| George Mason | The poor despise labor when performed by slaves. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The worst government is the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when the fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression. | |
| H. L. Mencken | Human progress is furthered, not by conformity, but by aberration. | |
| H. L. Mencken | That erroneous assumption is to the effect that the aim of public education is to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, and so make them fit to discharge the duties of citizenship in an enlightened and independent manner. Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all, it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States, whatever the pretensions of politicians, pedagogues and other such mountebanks, and that is its aim everywhere else. | |
| H. L. Mencken | I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society. | |
| Giovanni Miegge | Religious liberty is primarily a man’s liberty to profess a faith different from that of the dominant religion, and to unite in public worship with those who share his faith. | |
| John Stuart Mill | Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them. | |
| Henry Miller | Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. | |
| C. Wright Mills | If you do not specify and confront real issues, what you will do will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep. If you do not embody controversy, what you say will be an acceptance of the drift to the coming human hell. | |
| John Milton | When complaints are freely heard, deeply considered, and speedily reformed, then is the utmost bound of civil liberty obtained that wise men look for. | |
| Huey P. Newton | We were trying to increase the conflict that was already happening... we felt that we would take the conflict to so high a level that some change had to come. | |
| Huey P. Newton | The revolution has always been in the hands of the young.
The young always inherit the revolution. | |
| Huey P. Newton | If you stop struggling, then you stop life. | |
| Huey P. Newton | The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man.
Unless he understands this, he does not grasp the essential meaning of his life. | |
| Huey P. Newton | There will be no prison which can hold our movement down...
The walls, the bars, the guns and the guards
can never encircle or hold down the idea of the people. | |
| Charles Eliot Norton | The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent. | |
| P. J. O'Rourke | The Tenth Commandment sends a message to socialists, to egalitarians, to people obsessed with fairness, to American presidential candidates in the year 2000 -- to everyone who believes that wealth should be redistributed. And that message is clear and concise: Go to Hell. | |
| J. Robert Oppenheimer | As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress. | |
| George Orwell | If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. | |
| George Orwell | Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed—no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull. | |
| Dr. Ron Paul | Why is patriotism thought to be blind loyalty to the government and the politicians who run it, rather than loyalty to the principles of liberty and support for the people? Real patriotism is a willingness to challenge the government when it’s wrong. | |
| Pope Pius XII | One Galileo in two thousand years is enough. | |
| Jonathan Rauch | A liberal society stands on the proposition that we should all take seriously the idea that we might be wrong. This means we must place no one, including ourselves, beyond the reach of criticism (no final say); it means that we must allow people to err, even where the error offends and upsets, as it often will. | |
| William Winwood Reade | What a state of society is this in which freethinker is a term of abuse, and in which doubt is regarded as sin? | |
| Glenn Harlan Reynolds | [T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power -- and even the duty -- to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority. | |
| Theodore Roosevelt | 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. | |
| Dr. Benjamin Rush | Controversy is only dreaded by the advocates of error. | |
| Salman Rushdie | Free societies…are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric. | |
| Bertrand Russell | It is clear that thought is not free if the profession of certain opinions make it impossible to earn a living. | |
| Bertrand Russell | These men - ..., the politicians, ... - use their position, their knowledge, and their power of disseminating misinformation to arouse and stimulate the latent instinct for bloodshed. When they have succeeded, they say they are reluctantly forced to war by the pressure of public opinion. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Andrei Sakharov | Profound insights arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas but also dubious ideas. | |
| Joseph A. Schumpeter | The religious quality of Marxism also explains a characteristic attitude of the orthodox Marxist toward opponents. To him, as to any believer in a faith, the opponent is not merely in error but in sin. Dissent is unapproved of not only intellectually but also morally. | |
| Ben Shahn | Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact than a drunken man is happier than a sober one. | |
| Leo Shestov | Heretics were often most bitterly persecuted for their least deviation from accepted belief. It was precisely their obstinacy about trifles that irritated the righteous to madness. Why can they not yield on so trifling a matter? | |
| Ignazio Silone | Liberty is the possibility of doubting, the possibility of making a mistake, the possibility of searching and experimenting, the possibility of saying “No” to any authority -- literary, artistic, philosophic, religious, social and even political. | |
| Solon | We can have justice whenever those who have not been injured by injustice are as outraged by it as those who have been. | |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world. | |
| Thomas Sowell | One of the most pathetic — and dangerous — signs of our times is the growing number of individuals and groups who believe that no one can possibly disagree with them for any honest reason. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face. | |
| Justice Potter Stewart | [A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve it’s high purpose when it indices a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with things as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for understanding. | |
| The Holy Bible | For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. | |
| Justice Clarence Thomas | A good argument diluted to avoid criticism is not nearly as good as the undiluted argument, because we best arrive at truth through a process of honest and vigorous debate. Arguments should not sneak around in disguise, as if dissent were somehow sinister… For it is bravery that is required to secure freedom. | |
| Norman Thomas | Dissent... is a right essential to any concept of the dignity and freedom of the individual; it is essential to the search for truth in a world wherein no authority is infallible. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Others -- as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders -- serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few -- as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men -- serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part ... | |
| Henry David Thoreau | If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | Unjust laws exist: shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once? | |
| Henry David Thoreau | As for adopting the ways which the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such ways. They take too much time, and a man's life will be gone. | |
| Harry S. Truman | 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. | |
| Paul Valéry | The world acquires value only through its extremists play. They are the gadflies that keep society from being too complacent. | |
| Robert Gilbert Vansittart | The tragedy of the police state is that it always regards all opposition as a crime, and there are no degrees. | |
| Gore Vidal | The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity -- much less dissent. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | It is not conclusive proof of a doctrine’s correctness that its adversaries use the police, the hangman, and violent mobs to fight it. But it is a proof of the fact that those taking recourse to violent oppression are in their subconscious convinced of the untenability of their own doctrines. | |
| Earl Warren | Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society. | |
| George Washington | The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism … The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty. | |
| George Washington | If men are to be precluded from offering their sentiments on a matter which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences that can invite the consideration of mankind, reason is of no use; the freedom of speech may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter. | |
| Daniel Webster | The inherent right in the people to reform their government, I do not deny; and they have another right, and that is to resist unconstitutional laws without overturning the government. | |
| H. G. Wells | ... when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people ... will hate the new world order ... and will die protesting it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people. | |
| John W. Whitehead | Whatever the issue might be, whether it’s mass surveillance, no-knock raids, or the right to freely express one’s views about the government, we’ve moved into a new age in which the rights of the citizenry are being treated as a secondary concern by the White House, Congress, the courts and their vast holding of employees, including law enforcement officials. | |
| Oscar Wilde | Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress had been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. | |
| Claire Wolfe | America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. | |
| Claire Wolfe | Like ‘em or hate ‘em, these once peaceful gun owners of the ‘90s are feeling a lot like Jews of 1939 Germany. Maligned, lied about, persecuted and threatened. Afraid, confused and angry. | |
| Claire Wolfe | America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. On the road to tyranny, we've gone so far that polite political action is about as useless as a miniskirt in a convent. ... Something’s eventually going to happen. Government will bloat until it chokes us to death, or one more tyrannical power grab will turn out to be one too many. ... Maybe it’ll be one more round of “reasonable gun control” or one more episode of burning children to death to save them from “child abuse.” Whatever, something will snap. | |
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