Quotes about Dissent

Apartheid is, in my view, as abhorrent as anti-Semitism. To me, Andrei Sakharov's isolation is as much a disgrace as Joseph Begun's imprisonment and Ida Nudel's exile. As is the denial of Solidarity and its leader Lech Walesa's right to dissent. And Nelson Mandela's interminable imprisonment.

I beg you not to resort to demonstrations, for they have become nothing but burned paper.

Reeducation comes from voices that dissent from the unexamined comfort zone, from those who abrasively shock our comfort zones with voices from outside that violate the consensus that has been silently accepted.

A totalizing regime cannot tolerate dissent or subversion. Thus, as is necessary, totalizing regimes must silence dissent, must prohibit subversion, must control artists, must banish poets, and when necessary must kill prophets.

Such brutality is required because dissenters, subversives, artists, poets, and prophets invite thought that the regime is not absolute, that its claims to legitimacy are not ultimate, that its policies are not beyond criticism nor its practices beyond destabilization.

subversives in the face of totalism have always had to speak twice in the same utterance, once for the official record and once for the truth of bodily reality.

You must pay for conformity. All goes well as long as you run with conformists. But you, who are honest men in other particulars, know that there is alive somewhere a man whose honesty reaches to this point also, that he shall not kneel to false gods, and, on the day when you meet him, you sink into the class of counterfeits.

If you want to be loathsome to God, just run with the herd.