John Stuart Mill - Voltaire - Tony Benn - Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Gerben Wagenar - Network 1976 - Rab C Nesbitt TV - Alan Barth - Henry David Thoreau - Muhammad Ali - Noam Chomsky - Salman Rushdie - Utah Phillips - Susan Sontag - Michael Portillo - Martha Gellhorn - Oliver Stone TV - Howard Zinn - Mike Ruppert - Paul Foot - John F Kennedy - Robert Kennedy - Robert McChesney and John Nichols - Horizon TV - Frederick Douglass - John Lewis - Cesar Chavez - William Clay - Arundhati Roy - J William Fulbright - George Orwell - Archibald MacLeish - Saul Bellow - Henry Porter - Edward R Murrow - Barbara Ehrenreich - Michael Parenti - Palestine Wall message - William Faulkner - Albert Einstein - Kurt Cobain - Desmond Tutu - Benjamin Franklin - Harry Truman - Czeslaw Milosz - Abbie Hoffman - Abraham Lincoln - Christopher Hitchens - Jacob Bronowski - Dwight D Eisenhower - Harold Pinter - Margaret Heffernan - Rebecca MacKinnon - William O Douglas - Robert H Jackson - Samuel Johnson - Elie Wiesel - Reds 1981 - Terry Eagleton - John Lindsay - Martin Bell & BBC News TV - Friedrich Nietzsche - Edmund Burke - Charles Spurgeon - Storyville TV - Edward Seidensticker - Eric Hoffer - Mark Steel - John Pilger - Grasp the Nettle 2014 - Grin Without a Cat aka The Base of the Air is Red 1977 - The Opposition TV - World in Action TV - The Corbett Report - Abby Martin & Cody Snell - Abby Martin & Chris Hedges - If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front 2011 - The Square 2013 - Burma VJ: Reporting From a Closed Country 2008 - The Hour of the Furnaces 1968 - Michael Moore - Bobby Sands: 66 Days TV - The Angry Brigade 1973 - Persons Unknown 1980 - When Two Worlds Collide 2016 - Vive le Revolution! Joan Bakewell on 1968 TV - Contempt of Conscience 2009 - Donald Trump, the Koch Brothers, and Their War on Climate Science TV - Preempting Dissent 2014 - A Very Heavy Agenda TV - Chris Hedges - The Pipe 2010 - The Epic Saga of a Smart-Meter Opt-Out 2017 - America on Fire TV - 1983: The Brink of Apocalypse TV - The Anti-Vax Conspiracy TV - Taking Liberties TV - Mothers, Missiles and the American President TV -
The time appears to me to have come when it is the duty of all to make their dissent from religion known. John Stuart Mill
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
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary 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
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. Voltaire
[The first principle of British democracy is] our prime duty to each other and to what our conscience tells us to be right. If this leads individuals into conflict with the law, those individuals must be ready to take the consequences non-violently. In our democracy no man should tell another man to break the law, nor should any man break the law to by-pass Parliament. But a person who is punished for breaking an unjust law may if he is sincere and his cause wins public sympathy, create a public demand to have that unjust law changed through Parliament. This is the first and most fundamental principle of British democracy. It has a deep moral significance. Our religious and political liberties rest upon it. Tony Benn, speech Bristol, cited The Times 5 August 1972
Dissidents speak to a future age. It’s not simply to say, ‘My colleagues are wrong and I would do it this way.’ But the greatest dissents do become court opinions and gradually over time their views become the dominant view. So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, interview Nina Tottenberg 2 May 2002
Thousands in a tightly packed column marched through the streets in the centre of Amsterdam while the Germans circled round them in tanks. Of course the demonstrators weren’t armed, yet they found a weapon in marching and singing. Gerben Wagenar
I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work. Or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickle’s-worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do. And there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe. And our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, Please, at least leave us alone in our living-rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone. Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I won’t want you to ride. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being. Goddamit. My life has value! Network 1976 starring Faye Dunaway & Peter Finch & William Holden & Robert Duvall, director Sidney Lumet
cf.
We’re not going to take this any more. We’re as mad as Hell. Rab C Nesbitt, Racket, BBC 1996
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
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves. Henry David Thoreau
See, the greatest sports title mean nothing, mister, if you cannot be free, see. Boys in Vietnam are throwing away, you may say, their lives. I haven’t did that much. They are dying today to free somebody they don’t know. I’m still living. So what in the hell is a heavyweight title and a few sneaker dollar bills for my people’s freedom? Muhammad Ali, television Interview
Why should me and so-called Negroes go ten-thousand miles away from home and America to drop bombs and bullets on other innocent brown people who has never bothered us? And I will say directly, No, I will not go. Muhammad Ali
I think it only makes sense to seek out and identify structures of authority, hierarchy, and domination in every aspect of life, and to challenge them; unless a justification for them can be given, they are illegitimate, and should be dismantled, to increase the scope of human freedom. Noam Chomsky
I was never aware of any other option but to question everything. Noam Chomsky
Mere sparks can ignite a popular movement that may seem dormant. Professor Noam Chomsky
Free societies ... are societies in motion, and with motion comes tension, dissent, friction. Free people strike sparks, and those sparks are the best evidence of freedom’s existence. Salman Rushdie
The state can’t give you freedom, and the state can’t take it away. You’re born with it, like your eyes, like your ears. Freedom is something you assume, then you wait for someone to try to take it away. The degree to which you resist is the degree to which you are free. Utah Phillips
The likelihood that your acts of resistance cannot stop the injustice does not exempt you from acting in what you sincerely and reflectively hold to be the best interests of your community. Susan Sontag, At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches
Dissent and disagreement characterise the Church from its earliest days. Michael Portillo, Christianity: A History s1e2: Rome, Channel 4 2009
I’ll tell you what ‘anti-American’ is. It’s what governments and their vested interested call those who honour America by objecting to war and the theft of resources and believing in all of humanity. There are millions of these anti-Americans in the United States. They are ordinary people who belong to no elite and who judge their government in moral terms, though they would call it common decency. They are not vain. They are the people with a wakeful conscience, the best of America’s citizens. They can be counted on. They were in the south with the Civil Rights movement, ending slavery. They were in the streets, demanding an end to the wars in Asia. Sure, they disappear from view now and then, but they are like seeds beneath the snow. I would say they are truly exceptional. Martha Gellhorn, conversation with John Pilger