Protest Quotes

The burning of rebellious thoughts in the little breast, of internal hatred and opposition, could not long go on without slight whiffs of external smoke, such as mark the course of subterranean fire.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

If you want a symbolic gesture, don't burn the flag; wash it.

Norman Thomas

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.

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

If you attack the establishment long enough and hard enough, they will make you a member of it.

Art Buchwald

Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.

Marilyn Monroe

It has always been the prerogative of children and half-wits to point out that the emperor has no clothes. But a half-wit remains a half-wit, and the emperor remains an emperor.

Neil Gaiman

While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

Eugene Debs

There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.

Hannah Arendt

We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.

Eric Hoffer

We must develop huge demonstrations, because the world is used to big dramatic affairs. They think in terms of hundreds of thousands and millions and billions... Billions of dollars are appropriated at the twinkling of an eye. Nothing little counts.

A. Philip Randolph, Keynote addr

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down.

Oscar Romero

...it does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds...

Samuel Adams

When Hitler attacked the JewsThere are other versions. There is no definitive wording or verified source.

Martin Niem, Attributed: Congres

The nail that stands out will be hammered down.

Japanese Proverb