Dissidents Quotes - Page 4

• There is much to be done, there is much that can be done... One person of integrity, can make a difference, a difference of life and death. As long as one dissident is in prison, our freedom will not be true. As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame. What all these victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs.

  Elie Wiesel

  Children, Freedom, Integrity

  Elie Wiesel's Nobel Acceptance Speech in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 1986.

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• Batman: a force of chaos in my world of perfect order. The dark side of the Soviet dream. Rumored to be a thousand murdered dissidents, they said he was a ghost. A walking dead man. A symbol of rebellion that would never fade as long as the system survived. Anarchy in black.

  Mark Millar

  Dream, Dark, Men

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• I tried to imagine a church that did not support its country's wars as a matter of patriotic course and instead stood against the devastation and suffering they caused in people's lives." (from 'The Dance of the Dissident Daughter'.)

  Sue Monk Kidd

  Daughter, Country, War

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• Dissident Natan Sharansky writes that there are two kinds of states - “fear societies” and “free societies.”… The two societies make up two kinds of consciousness. The consciousness derived of oppression is despairing, fatalistic, and fearful of inquiry. It is mistrustful of the self and forced to trust external authority. It is premised on a dearth of self-respect. It is cramped …
  In contrast, the consciousness of freedom … is one of expansiveness, trust of the self, and hope. It is a consciousness of limitless inquiry … It builds up in a citizen a wealth of self-respect.

  Naomi Wolf

  Writing, Self, Two

  "Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries". Book by Naomi Wolf, September 16, 2008.

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• Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.

  Steven Erikson

  War, Fall, Self

  "Midnight Tides". Book by Steven Erikson, 2004.

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• It is satisfying for the descendant of a dissident refugee from Elizabeth I to present his credentials to Elizabeth II.

  Kingman Brewster, Jr.

  Credentials, Refugee, Elizabeth Ii

  The Observer, July 03, 1977.

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• Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

  Jonah Goldberg

  The End Of The Day, Likes, Puppy

  "Cynthia McKinney’s Last Stand" by Jonah Goldberg, October 29, 2001.

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• While public school history courses in the United States stress the horrors of the German Nazi murder of 6 million Jews and Josef Stalin's pogroms against racial minorities and political dissidents in the Soviet Union, the facts that the U.S. Army's solution to the 'Indian Problem' was the prototype for the Nazi 'Final Solution' to the 'Jewish Problem' and that the North American Indian Reservation was the model for the twentieth century gulag and concentration camp, are conveniently overlooked.

  Jonathan Ott

  Stress, School, Army

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• Unlike side issues like unemployment, unions, and minimum-wage laws, the subject of work itself is almost entirely absent from libertarian literature. Most of what little there is consists of Randite rantings against parasites, barely distinguishable from the invective inflicted on dissidents by the Soviet press.

  Bob Black

  Law, Issues, Unemployment

  "The Abolition of Work and Other Essays". Book by Bob Black, 1986.

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• Dominion is a spy novel, a love story, and also I hope gives some sense of the difficulties faced by dissidents under any totalitarian regime: the threat of imprisonment, torture and death; the threat to one's family, the terror of being alone in a hostile world.

  C.J. Sansom

  Giving, Spy, Stories

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• Just because you can watch half-nude women on afternoon television or gay men kissing on the streets of nearly any major city does not mean America is free, as complacent liberals might think, much less too free, as conservatives often suggest. Just because most dissidents are left alone doesn't mean there is no police state, for that would be convenient indeed for the police statists: the idea that people ought not complain so long as they have the right to do so.

  Anthony Gregory

  Mean, Kissing, Gay

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• The dominant propaganda systems have appropriated the term "globalization" to refer to the specific version of international economic integration that they favor, which privileges the rights of investors and lenders, those of people being incidental. In accord with this usage, those who favor a different form of international integration, which privileges the rights of human beings, become "anti-globalist."

  Noam Chomsky

  Rights, People, Favors

  Interview with Sniježana Matejčić, June 2005.

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• I believe that it is only through empathy, that the pain experienced by an Algerian woman, a North Korean dissident, a Rwandan child or an Iraqi prisoner, becomes real to me and not just passing news. And it is at times like this when I ask myself, am I prepared - like Huck Finn - to give up Sunday school heaven for the kind of hell that Huck chose?

  Azar Nafisi

  Children, Giving Up, Pain

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• The Soviet Union is going to have a human-rights explosion. You'll have hundreds of thousands of dissidents.

  Andrew Young

  Rights, Unions, Explosions

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• There was a period of time when I was very political, when I was at the university. It was like the late '60s, early '70s and I was a dissident like everybody else I guess. Now I follow it but there's nothing that really grabs me. The most fascinating thing to me right now is China.

  Jessica Lange

  Political, China, Periods

  "New Again: Jessica Lange". Interview with Bob Colacello, Andy Warhol, Robert Hayes, www.interviewmagazine.com. June 29, 2016.

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• There is one Islam, unreformed, but three sets of Muslims. Medina, Mecca, and. Dissidents, reformers, whatever you want to call them. The first group are the extremists and fundamentalists, the second the great mass of Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace, and the third are reformers.

  Ayaan Hirsi Ali

  Islam, Groups, Three

  "The Interview: Ayaan Hirsi Ali on reforming Islam". Interview with Brian Bethune, www.macleans.ca. April 13, 2015.

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• ISIS goes after any group that deviates from its extreme ideology, dissident Muslims, for example, or the Yazidis who practice an ancient religion distinct from both Islam and Christianity.

  Tom Gjelten

  Isis, Practice, Islam

  "As Christians Flee, Governments Pressured To Declare ISIS Guilty Of Genocide". "Morning Edition" with David Greene, www.npr.org. December 24, 2015.

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• I would very honestly just tell you that what I tried to do was simply respond to inquiries from people as they came in. Where I've thought I could say something useful, I've tried to add a voice that was, frankly, a dissident voice earlier on, but one that I think has become a more mainstream voice-and not because I've shifted. I think that the critique I had of what was going on in our financial system from six, eight years ago-after seeing some of what we've suffered through and even since the cataclysm itself-in terms of the structural changes.

  Eliot Spitzer

  Thinking, Voice, Eight

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies.... ...Liberty will come to those who love it.

  George W. Bush

  America, Bully, Liberty

  Second Presidential Inaugural Address, delivered 20 January 2005

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• Whether a country is actually free is determined not by how well-rewarded its convention-affirming media elites are and how ignored its passive citizens are but by how it treats its dissidents, those posing authentic challenges to what the government does.

  Glenn Greenwald

  Country, Government, Media

  "Surveillance State evils". www.salon.com. April 21, 2012.

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• We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which the dissident in exile is seen as a bold figure, and those who choose to work with restrictions on their freedom are considered patsies for repressive governments. Let's not forget that most writers in history have lived under nondemocratic regimes: Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Goethe didn't actually enjoy constitutionally guaranteed rights to freedom of speech.

  Pankaj Mishra

  War, Rights, Government

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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