80 Dissident Quotes
Following is our list of dissident quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .
Famous Dissident Quotes
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. — Norman Thomas
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism. — Howard Zinn
Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy. — Harry Belafonte
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not in its taste, but in its effects. — J. William Fulbright
The ultimate test of a society's freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it's how it treats its dissidents. — Glenn Greenwald
The only thing worth globalizing is dissent. — Arundhati Roy
What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. — Albert Camus
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. — Clarence Darrow
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. — Edward R. Murrow
What is a rebel? A man who says no. — Albert Camus
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots. — Barbara Ehrenreich
... he who has independent ideas is hated by the mass[es]. — Shang Yang
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
Protest is when I say...'I don't agree with something'.... Resistance is when I ensure that things with which I disagree no longer take place — Ulrike Meinhof
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it. — Edward R. Murrow
Short Dissident Quotes
- Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them. — Edward Snowden
- Acceptance by government of a dissident press is a measure of the maturity of a nation. — William O. Douglas
- When I am weak, then I am strong. — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova
- In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility. — Nelson Mandela
- There were no dissidents then in the USSR because they were all killed. — Natan Sharansky
- Sectors of power are not going to favor the flourishing of dissidence. — Noam Chomsky
- Stupidity is not a crime. — Alexei Navalny
- I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile. — Ha Jin
- When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident. — Nawal El Saadawi
- If you are creative, you must be dissident. — Nawal El Saadawi
Dissent Quotes
Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth. — William Faulkner
That's the one issue can't discuss.You can discuss abortion back and forth, discuss gun control back and forth. But you can't have a dissenting opinion in America (politics) on Israel. — David Duke
It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority. — Benjamin Franklin
Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president. — Theodore Roosevelt
Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly. — Mahatma Gandhi
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. — Edward R. Murrow
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, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
There is no mat space for malcontents or dissenters. One must neither celebrate insanely when he wins, nor sulk when he loses. He accepts victory professionally, humbly; he hates defeat, but makes no poor display of it. — Dan Gable
One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo. — Maajid Nawaz
People Writing About Dissident
| Name | Quotes | Likes |
|---|---|---|
 Albert Camus |
975 | 9693 |
 Edward R. Murrow |
79 | 2180 |
 Nawal El Saadawi |
90 | 354 |
 Norman Thomas |
22 | 206 |
 Howard Zinn |
222 | 1977 |
 Harry Belafonte |
74 | 899 |
More Dissident Quotes
I've always thought that the most powerful weapon in the world was the bomb and that's why I gave it to my people, but I've come to the conclusion that the most powerful weapon in the world is not the bomb but it's the truth — Andrei Sakharov
A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind. — Robert Sheckley
There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. — John F. Kennedy
The religion most prevalent in our northern colonies is a refinement on the principles of resistance: it is the dissidence of dissent, and the protestantism of the Protestant religion. — Edmund Burke
Heart is what drives us and determines our fate. That is what I need for my characters in my books: a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. — Isabel Allende
In the last analysis, human security means a child who did not die, a disease that did not spread, an ethnic tension that did not explode, a dissident who was not silenced, a human spirit that was not crushed. — Mahbub ul Haq
Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does. — Glenn Greenwald
The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy. — Andrew Sullivan
The role of dissident is not, and should not be, a claim of membership in a communion of saints. In other words, the more fallible the mammal, the truer the example. — Christopher Hitchens
Whenever there is injustice, oppression, aggression, violence, it's standard for it to be supported by those we now call "intellectuals," but typically not by all; there is typically a fringe of dissidents. With very rare exceptions - in fact, it's hard to think of any - they suffer in one or another way; how depends on the nature of the society. — Noam Chomsky
Privacy in one's associations... may in many circumstances be indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs. — John Marshall Harlan II
Through the inspiration of Vaclav's words, the courage of his dissidence and the integrity of his leadership, Czechoslovakia successfully transitioned from an authoritarian state to a free democracy at the heart of Europe. — Michael D. Higgins
People like me who were engaging in brinkmanship with the party economic bosses and the open dissidents who were being arrested were pursuing a common goal in different ways. — Vaclav Klaus
Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents. — Vaclav Klaus
Luckily I was not born in Eastern Europe, because I might have been born into the communist establishment and I'm glad I was not. But in Israel, communists were dissidents. So you grow up in an environment which is very critical of Israeli policies. — Amira Hass
All discussion, all debate, all dissidence tends to question and in consequence, to upset existing convictions; that is precisely its purpose and its justification. — Learned Hand
These are the values inspiring those brave workers in Poland. The values that have inspired other dissidents under communist domination. They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. — Ronald Reagan
History has witnessed the failure of many endeavors to impose peace by war, cooperation by coercion, unanimity by slaughtering dissidents.... A lasting order cannot be established by bayonets. — Ludwig von Mises
It is satisfying for the descendant of a dissident refugee from Elizabeth I to present his credentials to Elizabeth II. — Kingman Brewster, Jr.
Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black. — Mark Millar
Those of us and so many other stalwart critics and opponents and questioners and dissidents in conservative media were attacked for doing what those people in the mainstream media should have been doing. Do your job! Subject these political candidates to the same amount of scrutiny that you are now trying to compensate for with the incoming Trump administration! — Michelle Malkin
Dissidents are not imprisoned as in the domains of the Kremlin, in the old days. They do not have their brains blown out by elite forces armed and trained by the reigning superpower, as happens in Washington's domains - with no particular concern at home - an important fact, one of many that help us learn about ourselves, if we choose. — Noam Chomsky
The executions, persecution and imprisonment of political dissidents and the LGBT community, denial of free press, elections and religious freedoms, continue to be Fidel Castro's legacy. — Andy Garcia
It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all. — Molly Antopol
To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation. — Zeena Schreck
It's very important to remember that the philosophers were social dissidents. They were social critics. The man in the street or woman in the street did not particularly cherish what they said. Socrates was killed. — Rebecca Goldstein
Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority. — Eric Hoffer
You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society. — Vaclav Havel
The dissident does not operate in the realm of genuine power at all. He is not seeking power. He has no desire for office and does not gather votes. He does not attempt to charm the public, he offers nothing and promises nothing. He can offer, if anything, only his own skin -- and he offers it solely because he has no other way of affirming the truth he stands for. His actions simply articulate his dignity as a citizen, regardless of the cost. — Vaclav Havel
What I need for my characters in my books [is] a passionate heart. I need mavericks, dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules and take risks. — Isabel Allende
We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us. But we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up. — Julian Assange
Our focus needs to be on freeing dissidents and continuing to support the opposition movement within Cuba - not rewarding Castro and subsidizing and strengthening his totalitarian regime. — Mel Martinez
The case of Iran, a nuclear program that the Iranians admit was 18 years on, that we underestimated. And, in fact, we didn't discover it. It was discovered by a group of Iranian dissidents outside the country who pointed the international community at the location. — David Kay
Feminism is dead. The movement is absolutely dead. The women's movement tried to suppress dissident voices for way too long. There's no room for dissent. — Camille Paglia
Let us be clear: there are no Salafist armed groups in Syria. Those carrying arms are mostly members of the dissident army. The armed groups are defected soldiers. But they are not all organized. After they defect, they often disappear into different neighborhoods as they struggle for their safety. They need salaries, they need guarantees for protection, they need livelihoods. That is the way everyone will be brought together. — Burhan Ghalioun
The people we call the prophets I think are the earliest dissident intellectuals, and they're treated like most dissident intellectuals - very badly. They're imprisoned, driven into the desert. King Ahab, the epitome of evil in the Bible, condemned Elijah as a "hater of Israel." This is the first self-hating Jew, the origin of the term. It goes right up to the present. That's the history of intellectuals. — Noam Chomsky
The drafters of the [Refugee Convention ] had the Cold War in mind and mainly sought to protect a few thousand dissidents from the Communist bloc. They did not envision the mass displacements of people we are seeing today. — Kofi Annan
When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department. — Rachel Maddow
I think a lot of voters have certain cognitive dissidence. Donald Trump is getting social conservatives, economic conservatives, some Libertarian, some supply side conservatives, debt hawks. The conservative and Republican base is not monolithic. It has subsets that he seems to be appealing to all of them. — Roger Stone
In Conclusion
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