These dissent quotes will inspire you. Dissent to publicly disagree with an official opinion, decision, or set of beliefs or the expression or holding of opinions at variance with those previously, commonly, or officially held.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging dissent quotes, dissent sayings, and dissent proverbs.
Famous Dissent Quotes
- “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 or any other public official, save exactly to the degree in which he himself stands by the country. It is patriotic to support him insofar as he efficiently serves the country. It is unpatriotic not to oppose him to the exact extent that by inefficiency or otherwise he fails in his duty to stand by the country. In either event, it is unpatriotic not to tell the truth, whether about the president or anyone else.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
- “The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity – much less dissent.” ~ Gore Vidal
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“Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.” ~ John F. Kennedy
- “Protest beyond the law is not a departure from democracy; it is absolutely essential to it.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “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
- “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
- “Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.” ~ Albert Einstein
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“Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Will dissent be permitted? The answer to that question will determine whether the society is a free society or a fear society.” ~ Natan Sharansky
- “Dissents speak to a future age.” ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg
- “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
- “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” ~ Robert H. Jackson
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“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
- “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” ~ Howard Zinn
- “If the machine of government is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
- “We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty.” ~ Edward R. Murrow
- “If our democracy is to flourish, it must have criticism; if our government is to function it must have dissent.” ~ Henry Steele Commager
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“The aim of public education is not to spread enlightenment at all; it is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed a standard citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.” ~ H. L. Mencken
- “It’s so easy for propaganda to work, and dissent to be mocked.” ~ Harold Pinter
- “Patriotism is usually the refuge of the scoundrel. He is the man who talks the loudest.” ~ Mark Twain
- “Free societies are societies in which the right of dissent is protected.” ~ Natan Sharansky
- “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
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“So now is the time, more than ever, for those who truly value all the principles of democracy, especially including dissent, to be the most forceful in speaking up, standing up and speaking out.” ~ Jim Hightower
- “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
- “Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
- “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ~ Frederick Douglass
- “If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.” ~ John Stuart Mill , Silencing dissent quotes
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“Mere unorthodoxy or dissent from the prevailing mores is not to be condemned. The absence of such voices would be a symptom of grave illness to our society.” ~ Earl Warren
- “To announce that there must be no criticism of the president… is morally treasonable to the American public.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
- “Freedom is hammered out on the anvil of discussion, dissent, and debate.” ~ Hubert H. Humphrey
- “The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.” ~ Thomas Jefferson
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“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.” ~ Edward R. Murrow
- “The right to dissent is the only thing that makes life tolerable for a judge of an appellate court… the affairs of government could not be conducted by democratic standards without it.” ~ William O. Douglas
- “If, even as the price to be paid for a fifth vote, I ever joined an opinion for the Court that began: ‘The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity,’ I would hide my head in a bag. The Supreme Court of the United States has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.” ~ Antonin Scalia
- “The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.” ~ John Stuart Mill
- “In a democracy, dissent is an act of faith.” ~ J. William Fulbright
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“A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “Dissents are appeals to the brooding spirit of the law, to the intelligence of another day.” ~ Charles Evans Hughes
- “Truth is dissent, where all power resides in the Big Lie.” ~ Allen Ginsberg
- “In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.” ~ Learned Hand
- “The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.” ~ Friedrich Durrenmatt
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“The beginning of thought is in disagreement – not only with others but also with ourselves.” ~ Eric Hoffer
- “To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation.” ~ Antonin Scalia
- “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.” ~ David Mamet
- “Dissent is the native activity of the scientist, and it has got him into a good deal of trouble in the last years. But if that is cut off, what is left will not be a scientist. And I doubt whether it will be a man.” ~ Jacob Bronowski
- “We see political leaders replacing moral imperatives with a Southern strategy. We have seen all too clearly that there are men-now in power in this country-who do not respect dissent, who cannot cope with turmoil, and who believe that the people of America are ready to support repression as long as it is done with a quiet voice and a business suit. And it is up to us to prove that they are wrong.” ~ John Lindsay
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“Discussion in America means dissent.” ~ James Thurber
- “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
- “If what your country is doing seems to you practically and morally wrong, is dissent the highest form of patriotism?” ~ Howard Zinn
- “Top-down authority structures turn employees into bootlickers, breed pointless struggles for political advantage, and discourage dissent.” ~ Gary Hamel
- “When you would suffocate or ignore dissent, remember how many times you dissented.” ~ Fausto Cercignani
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“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.” ~ Will Durant
- “To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.” ~ George Steiner
- “It’s beyond me how anybody can look at these protestors and call them anything other than what they are: anti-American, anticapitalist, pro-Marxist communists.” ~ Rush Limbaugh
- “Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.” ~ Abe Fortas
- “Man is about to be an automaton; he is identifiable only in the computer. As a person of worth and creativity, as a being with an infinite potential, he retreats and battles the forces that make him inhuman. The dissent we witness is a reaffirmation of faith in man; it is protest against living under rules and prejudices and attitudes that produce the extremes of wealth and poverty and that make us dedicated to the destruction of people through arms, bombs, and gases, and that prepare us to think alike and be submissive objects for the regime of the computer.” ~ William O. Douglas
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“In a dead religion there are no more heresies.” ~ Andre Suares
- “If a community decides that some conduct is prejudicial to itself, and so decides by numbers sufficient to impose its will upon dissenters, I know of no principle which can stay its hand.” ~ Learned Hand
- “Realization of this need means adults must awaken to the urgency of the young people’s unrest-in other words there must be created an adult unrest against the inequities and injustices in the present system. If the government is in jeopardy, it is not because we are unable to cope with revolutionary situations. Jeopardy means that either the leaders or the people do not realize they have all the tools required to make the revolution come true. The tools and the opportunity exist. Only the moral imagination is missing.” ~ William O. Douglas
- “Leading fosters a working atmosphere that stimulates an open exchange of ideas and fosters dissent. People should show a genuine concern for one another and treat one another with fairness, as peers and friends. With such an atmosphere it should be a pleasure to come to work.” ~ Marvin Bower
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“The real truth is, I just want to keep the voice of dissent alive in all of our elections. I don’t really want to hang out with politicians.” ~ Roseanne Barr
- “No doubt, there are those who believe that judges – and particularly dissenting judges – write to hear themselves say, as it were, ‘I, I, I.’ And no doubt, there are also those who believe that judges are, like Joan Didion, primarily engaged in the writing of fiction. I cannot agree with either of those propositions.” ~ William J. Brennan
