Dissidents Quotes - Page 2

• When I am weak, then I am strong.

  Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

  Strong, I Am Strong, Weak

  "Here's What Russian Punk Band Pussy Riot Said At The Conclusion Of Their Controversial Blasphemy Trial". Nadezhda Tolokonnikova's closing speech at the Pussy Riot trial in Russia, www.businessinsider.com. August 10, 2012.

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• Stupidity is not a crime.

  Alexei Navalny

  Stupidity, Crime

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• When someone at the State Department proclaims Facebook to be the most organic tool for promoting democracy the world has ever seen - that's a direct quote - it may help in the short run by getting more people onto Facebook by making it more popular with dissidents.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Running, People, Democracy

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• The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Religious, Order, Political

  "Imaginationland". "The Daily Dish", www.theatlantic.com. October 25, 2007.

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• When Vladimir Putin runs up against American power and American criticism and American leadership that reminds him of what Russia isn`t, when he runs up against people who he worries are funding his dissidents or supporting protests against him, when he runs up against criticism of the way he runs his own country, what he`s running up against is the State Department.

  Rachel Maddow

  Running, Country, Russia

  Source: www.msnbc.com

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• To use the terms that are reserved for official enemies, it is the commissars and apparatchiks, not the dissidents, who are respected and privileged within their own societies.

  Noam Chomsky

  Enemy, Use, Term

  Source: www.publicanthropology.org

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• We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us, but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up.

  Julian Assange

  People, Acting, Way

  "Why the world needs WikiLeaks". Interview with Chris Anderson, www.ted.com. July 2010.

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• It was this feeling for a lot of my characters, who are dissidents or banned artists and writers, that they had had to fight living under so much surveillance, and then suddenly they come to America and they're like, I'm not being surveilled - I'm not even being noticed at all.

  Molly Antopol

  Character, Fighting, Artist

  Source: therumpus.net

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• An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

  Michel Foucault

  Country, Taken, Mean

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

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• Give the FBI unchecked domestic spying powers and instead of focusing on preventing terrorism, it will revert to doing what it does best - monitoring, harassing, and intimidating political dissidents and thousands of harmless immigrants.

  Wendy Kaminer

  Giving, Political, Doe

  "Ashcroft's Lies". prospect.org. June 27, 2002.

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• Privacy in one's associations... may in many circumstances be indispensable to freedom of association, particularly where a group espouses dissident beliefs.

  John Marshall Harlan II

  Justice, Groups, May

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• I don't think of myself as a dissident, and I'm more of an immigrant than an exile.

  Ha Jin

  Thinking, Exile, Immigrants

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• Then in 1969, I spent the spring term at Cornell University in New York. The invasion of August 1968 had already happened, but the hardline regime took several months to crack down on dissidents.

  Vaclav Klaus

  New York, Spring, August

  "No Third Way Out: An Interview with Vaclav Klaus". Interview with John Fund, reason.com. June 1, 1990.

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• Here I am: a Russian-speaking Jew living in Canada, and you, an Indian ex-patriot living in San Francisco. All of a sudden we commune in this moment about a much older Russian political dissident.That's the human part of being human: feeling those moments.

  David Bezmozgis

  San Francisco, Here I Am, Political

  The Believer interview, logger.believermag.com. September 23, 2014.

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• The era of appeasement must come to an end. The political and social demands that dissidents are making of the universities do not flow from sound basic educational criteria, but from strategic considerations on how to radicalize the student body, polarize the campus and extend the privileged enclaves of student power.

  Spiro T. Agnew

  Educational, Political, Sound

  John R. Coyne, Spiro T. Agnew (1972). “The Impudent Snobs: Agnew Vs. the Intellectual Establishment”, New Rochelle, N.Y. : Arlington House

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• The first job of the historian and of the journalist is to find facts. Not the only job, perhaps not the most important, but the first. Facts are the cobblestones from which we build roads of analysis, mosaic tiles that we fit together to compose pictures of past and present. There will be disagreement about where the road leads and what reality or truth is revealed by the mosaic picture. The facts themselves must be checked against all the available evidence. But some are round and hard--and the most powerful leaders in the world can trip over them. So can writers, dissidents and saints.

  Timothy Garton Ash

  Jobs, Powerful, Reality

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• When we live in a world that is very unjust, you have to be a dissident.

  Nawal El Saadawi

  World, Unjust, Humanitarian

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• Ours is a golden age of minorities. At no time in the past have dissident minorities felt so much at home and had so much room to throw their weight around. They speak and act as if they were "the people," and what they abominate most is the dissent of the majority.

  Eric Hoffer

  Home, Past, People

  Eric Hoffer (1977). “In our time”, McNally & Loftin Publishers

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• The heaviest snowfall in over 60 years is being reported in Beijing, China. To give you an idea of how bad it is, the army is now using snowplows to run over dissidents.

  Jay Leno

  Running, Army, Ideas

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• There's plenty of stuff that I don't feel dissident about: I really like tea, I don't have any problem with that. I like lots of paintings.

  China Mieville

  Tea, Stuff, Painting

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• A lot of us don't want to be quite that serious about world problems. Our life is there to enjoy, not to be an eternal dissident, eternally unhappy with how things are and with the state of mankind.

  Robert Sheckley

  Unhappy, World, Want

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• A snappy label and a manifesto would have been two of the very last things on my own career want list. That label enabled mainstream science fiction to safely assimilate our dissident influence, such as it was. Cyberpunk could then be embraced and given prizes and patted on the head, and genre science fiction could continue unchanged.

  William Gibson

  Careers, Two, Labels

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• This is the real tragedy of America's 'Internet freedom agenda': It's going to be the dissidents in China and Iran who will pay for the hypocrisy that drove it from the very beginning.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Real, Iran, America

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• I am of mixed minds about the issue of privacy. On one hand, I understand that information is power, and power is, well, power, so keeping your private information to yourself is essential - especially if you are a controversial figure, a celebrity, or a dissident.

  Susan Orlean

  Information Is Power, Hands, Issues

  "Stay Out of My Dropbox" by Susan Orlean, www.newyorker.com. May 18, 2011.

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• Madonna Kolbenschlag suggest that if an awakened woman forgoes innocence and denial, if she refuses to make compromises with herself and defect to patriarchy, then her only option becomes deviance. I chose deviance. I chose to be a loving dissident. To dance the dance of dissidence. This stance can be assumed from the inside or the outside. Whichever place we choose, the important thing is having the sustained will to be, act, and speak from the ground of our feminine souls.

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Soul, Important, Denial

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