Quotes About Dissent

The important thing about groupthink is that it works not so much by censoring dissent as by making dissent seem somehow improbable.

To oppose the policies of a government does not mean you are against the country or the people that the government supposedly represents. Such opposition should be called what it really is: democracy, or democratic dissent, or having a critical perspective about what your leaders are doing. Either we have the right to democratic dissent and criticism of these policies or we all lie down and let the leader, the Fuhrer, do what is best, while we follow uncritically, and obey whatever he commands. That's just what the Germans did with Hitler, and look where it got them.

I tell myself I use art to promote dissent, but maybe I am just using dissent to promote my art. I plead not guilty to selling out. But I plead it from a bigger house than I used to live in.

[Vladimir] Putin is an enemy of political dissent. The U.S. celebrates political dissent and the right for people to argue free from violence about places where our ideas are in conflict.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

Radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream; they must swim against the current. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity.

Wherever you go, whether it be a college campus or the New York Times or ABC News or Venezuela or Cuba or the former Soviet Union, it's amazing how the speech codes and the trying to shut up dissent is a defining aspect of the left because they believe so firmly in their utopian ideals that anyone who would disagree with that utopia is an enemy of the state, and they treat them as such.

I disagree with the Supreme Court's decision and I agree with the dissent. What the court did not do on its last day in session, I will do on my first day if elected president of the United States, and that is I will act to repeal ObamaCare.

We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police; but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder ‘censorship,’ we call it ‘concern for commercial viability.

Rejecting the notion that democracy and markets are the same, young people are calling for an end to the poverty, grotesque levels of economic inequality, the suppression of dissent and the permanent war state.

Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.

To advance from a nuanced dissent to a compelling vision, progressive policymakers should turn to the great mainstay of twentieth-century U.S. foreign policy: liberal internationalism... (which) should offer assertive leadership - diplomatic, economic, and not least, military - to advance a broad array of goals.

When people are oppressed, and human rights are denied - particularly along sectarian lines or ethnic lines - when dissent is silenced, it feeds violent extremism, it creates an environment that is ripe for terrorists to exploit. When peaceful, democratic change is impossible, it feeds into the terrorist propaganda that violence is the only answer available.

The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.

He who dictates and formulates the words and phrases we use, he who is master of the press and radio, is master of the mind. Repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity for communicating dissent and opposition. This is the formula for political conditioning of the masses.

In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.

I personally am inclined to approach [housework] the way governments treat dissent: ignore it until it revolts.

Trump was so different - in a bad way - that I thought the best thing I could do was to resist him. And that's because he was attacking the institutions of our democracy, from the First Amendment and the free press to the judiciary. He was stifling internal dissent, and then he was making false and misleading statements routinely. And to me, that's what takes us down the road to authoritarianism and that's why I decided to start resisting him.

Kaka beat Fletcher to the ball, and headed it past Heinze as the Argentine sought to close him down. Heinze could still have dealt with the problem, but, inexplicably, Patrice Evra came flying in like a runaway TGV. Heinze was flattened, Fletcher was so shocked that he stopped to rubber-neck, and Kaka strolled on and rolled the ball past Van der Sar. Evra's nightmare of a half continued when he crazily got himself cautioned for dissent, so removing Ferguson's one remaining first-choice defender from the away leg. Madness.

... feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.

The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.

Of course, the new domestic paramilitary forces will also undermine free speech and dissent with the threat of force while simultaneously threatening core civil liberties, rights and civic responsibilities.

Continue to express your dissent and your needs, but remember to remain civilized, for you will sorely miss civilization if it is sacrified in the turbulence of change.

In any totalitarian society, dissent is viewed as a threat, civic literacy is denounced, and those public spheres that produce engage citizens are dismantled or impoverished through the substitution of training for education.

The President proclaims war, and those Senators who dissent are not those who know better, but those who can afford to...Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.

Some of our newspapers and magazines are more concerned with the welfare of their advertisers than they are with the dissemination of news and the discussion of matters of lasting importance. ...Radio, television, motion pictures, popular books - all contribute...to...the stifling of dissent on all but the most banal levels. ...a renunciation of the most basic and precious of democratic principles.

Okay, so here's my question: When did civility become incompatible with protest? Why do some people consider civility an antonym - anathema, even - to political action and dissent? Because, and I'm raising my voice, it's not. Have we forgotten how Mahatma Gandhi used nonviolent civil disobedience to free India from British rule and inspire civil rights movements worldwide?