Dissent Quotes

I respect only those who resist me; but I cannot tolerate them.

Charles de Gaulle

Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.

Andrea Dworkin

Discussion in America means dissent.

James Thurber

It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.

William Hazlitt

When you put your hand to the plow, you can't put it down until you get to the end of the row.

Alice Paul

I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I've always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself.

Antonio Gramsci

I love opposition that has convictions.

Frederick the Great

It is easy and dismally enervating to think of opposition as merely perverse or actually evil -- far more invigorating to see it as essential for honing the mind, and as a positive good in itself. For the day that moral issues cease to be fought over is the day the word human disappears from the race.

Jill Tweedie

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law

Martin Luther King Jr.

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.

Edmund Burke

I stood among them, but not of them; in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

If everyone is thinking alike, then no one is thinking.

Benjamin Franklin

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.

Dwight D Eisenhower

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

Abraham Lincoln

Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.

Wayne Dyer

It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.

Benjamin Franklin

Resistance is thought transformed into feeling. Change the thought that creates the resistance, and there is no more resistance.

Robert Conklin

Assent -- and you are sane -- , demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- , and handled with a Chain -- .

Emily Dickinson

Opposition always enflames the enthusiast, never converts him.

Friedrich von Schiller