Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Comment on this quote Share via Email Print this Page [1-20] of 173 Dissent quotesDissent QuotesDissent Next 20 quotes And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them; or to prevent the people from petitioning, in a peaceable and orderly manner, the federal legislature, for a redress of grievances; or to subject the people to unreasonable searches and seizures of their persons, papers or possessions.~ Samuel Adams The freedom to share one’s insights and judgments verbally or in writing is, just like the freedom to think, a holy and inalienable right of humanity that, as a universal human right, is above all the rights of princes.~ Carl Friedrich Bahrdt The right to unite freely and to separate freely is the first and most important of all political rights.~ Mikhail A. Bakunin Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.~ Alan Barth And now that the legislators and do-gooders have so futilely inflicted so many systems upon society, may they finally end where they should have begun: May they reject all systems, and try liberty; for liberty is an acknowledgment of faith in God and His works.~ Frederic Bastiat Open discussion of many major public questions has for some time now been taboo. We can’t open our mouths without being denounced as racists, misogynists, supremacists, imperialists or fascists. As for the media, they stand ready to trash anyone so designated.~ Saul Bellow An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.~ Justice Hugo L. Black What finally emerges from the ‘clear and present danger’ cases is a working principle that the substantive evil must be extremely serious and the degree of imminence extremely high before utterances can be punished…It must be taken as a command of the broadest scope that explicit language, read in the context of a liberty-loving society, will allow.~ Justice Hugo L. Black No more fatuous chimera has ever infested the brain than that you can control opinions by law or direct belief by statute, and no more pernicious sentiment ever tormented the heart than the barbarous desire to do so. The field of inquiry should remain open, and the right of debate must be regarded as a sacred right.~ William E. Borah The constitutional right of free speech has been declared to be the same in peace and war. In peace, too, men may differ widely as to what loyalty to our country demands, and an intolerant majority, swayed by passion or by fear, may be prone in the future, as it has been in the past, to stamp as disloyal opinions with which it disagrees.~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis I like the noise of democracy.~ James Buchanan No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.~ Alan Bullock He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper.~ Edmund Burke Every wrong seems possible today, and is accepted. I don't accept it.~ Pablo Casals You make men love their government and their country by giving them the kind of government and the kind of country that inspire respect and love; a country that is free and unafraid, that lets the discontented talk in order to learn the causes of their discontent and end those causes, that refuses to impel men to spy on their neighbors, that protects its citizens vigorously from harmful acts while it leaves the remedies for objectionable ideas to counter-argument and time.~ Zechariah Chafee, Jr. The majority of us are for free speech when it deals with subjects concerning which we have no intense feelings.~ Edmund B. Chaffee All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.~ William Kingdon Clifford We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans...~ Bill Clinton The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.~ Jean Baptiste Colbert Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming.~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge Next 20 quotes Share on Facebook Tweet Email Print