“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
“Blind belief in authority is the greatest enemy of truth.”
― Albert Einstein
“Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
“If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.”
― Desmond Tutu
“It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong.”
― Voltaire
“One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.
“It is the first responsibility of every citizen to question authority.”
― Benjamin Franklin
“The duty of youth is to challenge corruption.”
― Kurt Cobain
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”
― Harry S. Truman
“Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.”
― Mahatma Gandhi
“In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”
― Galileo Galilei
“A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.”
― Robert A. Heinlein
“Proclaim the truth and do not be silent through fear.”
― St. Catherine of Siena
“My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself. We need more dissent and less dogma.”
― Camille Paglia
“Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.”
― John F. Kennedy
“Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.”
― Jacob Bronowski
“We seldom learn much from someone with whom we agree.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“The right of dissent, or, if you prefer, the right to be wrong, is surely fundamental to the existence of a democratic society. That’s the right that went first in every nation that stumbled down the trail toward totalitarianism.”
― Edward R. Murrow
“Don’t exercise your freedom of speech until you have exercised your freedom of thought.”
― Tim Fargo
“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation.”
― Eugene V. Debs
“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
“Evangelicals now stand among those who are on easiest terms with the world, for they have lost their capacity for dissent.”
― David F. Wells
“Ecologist Paul Ehrlich stressed that people who hold opposing opinions need to engage in open discussion with well-reasoned dissent. Positions should be questioned and criticized, not the people who hold them. Personal attacks preclude open discussion because, once someone is put on the defensive, fruitful exchanges are impossible, at least for the moment.”
― Marc Bekoff
“It’s your obligation to speak the truth, and everyone can either take it or leave it. But truth must be in us. We live in such a poverty of truth today.”
― Mother Angelica
“Who is an elected government in a constitutional democracy to decide it will not tolerate dissent?”
― Christina Engela
“They’re called ‘facts’, and my role is to amplify those, not cheerlead. And I don’t care at all what you think of my motives.”
― Glenn Greenwald
“Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.”
― Adrienne Rich
“We live in a world where unfortunately the distinction between true and false appears to become increasingly blurred by manipulation of facts, by exploitation of uncritical minds, and by the pollution of the language.”
― Arne Tiselius
“Freedom of speech is unnecessary if the people to whom it is granted do not think for themselves.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
“Those who make conversations impossible, make escalation inevitable.”
― Stefan Molyneux
“Critical thinking is thinking about your thinking while you’re thinking in order to make your thinking better.”
― Richard Paul
“It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. Obviously those two modes of thought are in some tension. But if you are able to exercise only one of these modes, whichever one it is, you’re in deep trouble.
― Carl Sagan
“Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.”
― Edward Abbey
“If we are not prepared to think for ourselves, and to make the effort to learn how to do this well, we will always be in danger of becoming slaves to the ideas and values of others due to our own ignorance.”
― William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, Katheryn Doran
“If we seek solace in the prisons of the distant past;
Security in human systems we’re told will always always last;
Emotions are the sail and blind faith is the mast;
Without the breath of real freedom we’re getting nowhere fast.”
― Sting
“Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde
“Freedom that lacks moral truth becomes its own worst enemy.”
― George Weigel
“The truth is not always the same as the majority decision.”
― Saint John Paul the Great
“People often claim to hunger for truth, but seldom like the taste when it’s served up.”
― George R.R. Martin
“Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth.”
― Father Robert Barron
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Dissenting Voices 