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Disobedience Quotes
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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.