THE QUOTABLE DISSENTING HERETIC
Copyright 2014 by Steve Dustcircle
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION
A lot of people are not happy with politics. In many family
gatherings, politics (and religion) are often frowned upon during conversation, and is usually the cause of much heated debate, incensed arguments, and possible disfellowshiping.
But even if the topic of politics is taboo, we all agree that it's an important part of our every day lives. Everything we do,
everything we buy, everything we wish to avoid has to do with politics.
No one can say that they don't care about politics. They might not know a lot about the political landscape, but all of us are on some level or another concerned with how our country is ran, and how policies affect each of us corporately and individually.
No matter of you're a single parent, a family of eight, a small business owner, a wealthy entrepreneur, an immigrant, or a
soldier in a military family, politics and policy has a role in what is allowed and not allowed by law. Sometimes, what is allowed and not allowed is decided in spite of what the law says.
These matters and concerns have bothered and encouraged many now, as they have since the birth of politics and government leadership. And it will do so far into the future.
Most people want to be left alone, as long as they're not harming anyone. Some want a just leadership that is not abusive. Some want to be their own leader. No matter where you stand
politically, or what Party (or non-party) you show allegiance to, we all pretty much want the same thing: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Some people stood up for themselves, and some people weren't allowed to stand at all, but all had a voice. Some were political, some were philosophical, but all were thought-provoking.
Here are some of their statements, in no particular order:
Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.
- Jeremy Bentham
Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national
security.
- William O. Douglas
Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.
- Woodrow Wilson
Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.
- John Perry Barlow
Over grown military establishments are under any form of
government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.
- George Washington
Whatever crushes individuality is despotism.
- John Stuart Mill
The spirit of this country is totally adverse to a large military force.
- Thomas Jefferson
If our forefathers had killed for freedom and democracy, what makes you think we also won't kill for our freedom and
democracy?
- Steve Dustcircle
The military caste did not originate as a party of patriots, but as a party of bandits.
- Henry Louis Mencken
Imperialism is an institution under which one nation asserts the right to seize the land or at least to control the government or resources of another people.
- John T. Flynn
We can shape the national sentiment with our voices of
compassion and reason. We can send the simple message that we must not kill innocent people in the name of justice.
- Fran Korten
I believe in liberty for all men: the space to stretch their arms and their souls; the right to breathe and the right to vote, the freedom to choose their friends, enjoy the sunshine, and ride on the railroads, uncursed by color; thinking, dreaming, working as they will in a kingdom of beauty and love.
- W. E. B. Du Bois
Let's be realists, let's dream the impossible.
- Che Guevara
An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy - or worse.
- Bill Moyers
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
- Albert Einstein
If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do.
- John Pilger
If you tremble with indignation at every injustice, then you are a comrade of mine.
- Che Guevara
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
- George Orwell
All warfare is based on deception.
- Sun Tzu
If my soldiers were to begin to think, not one of them would remain in the army.
- Frederick the Great
When you invite people to think, you are inviting revolution.
- Ivana Gabara
I knew that the moment the great governing spirit strikes the blow to divide all humanity into just two opposing factions, I would be on the side of the common people.
-Che Guevara
I know you've come to kill me. Shoot, you are only going to kill a man.
- Che Guevara
It is the responsibility of the patriot to protect his country from its government.
- Thomas Paine
I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited
power.
- Benjamin Franklin
The issue today is the same as it has been throughout all history, whether man shall be allowed to govern himself or be ruled by a small elite.
- Thomas Jefferson
One man with courage is a majority.
- Thomas Jefferson
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.
- Edmund Burke
The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any.
- Alice Walker
Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.
- Leonardo da Vinci
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
- George Orwell
This generation is burning the mass media to the ground. We are reclaiming our rights to world history.
- Julian Assange
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.
- Noam Chomsky
It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men's lives should not stake their own.
- H.G. Wells
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?
- Mahatma Gandhi
Both the democrats and republicans have betrayed the principles of the declaration of independence.
- John Lewis
Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.
- Noam Chomsky
I recoil with horror at the ferociousness of man. Will nations never devise a more rational umpire of differences than force?
- Thomas Jefferson
Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism
because it is a merger of State and corporate power.
- Benito Mussolini
And if Bradley Manning really did as he is accused, he is a hero, an example to us all and one of the world's foremost political prisoners.
- Julian Assange
If Wars Can Be Started by Lies, They Can Be Stopped By Truth.
- Unknown
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace
alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken
Secularism is spreading incredibly fast.
- Damian Thompson
Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person’s life, freedom of religion affects every
individual. Religious institutions that use government power in support of themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths, or of no faith, undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of an established religion tends to make the clergy unresponsive to their own people, and leads to corruption within religion itself. Erecting the “wall of separation between church and state,” therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
- Thomas Jefferson
Fascism is capitalism plus murder.
- Upton Sinclair
The Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.
- John Adams
We can have a democracy or we can have great wealth in the
hands of a comparative few, but we cannot have both.
- Louis Brandeis
If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.
- Joseph Goebbels
Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore.
- Cesar Chavez
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
- George Orwell
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to
sustain it.
- Lysander Spooner
The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it.
- John Hay
Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by a difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought to be
deprecated.
- George Washington
The death of one is a tragedy; the death of a million is just a statistic.
- Marilyn Manson
How can you have a war on terrorism when war itself is
terrorism?
- Howard Zinn
Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.
- Thomas Jefferson
As soon as we abandon our own reason, and are content to rely upon authority, there is no end to our troubles.
- Bertrand Russell
If you think of humanity as one large body, then war is like suicide, or at best, self mutilation.
- Jerome P. Crabb
The empires of the future are the empires of the mind.
- Winston Churchill
You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.
- Mahatma Gandhi
To some degree it matters who's in office, but it matters more how much pressure they're under from the public.
- Noam Chomsky
Washington...has become an alien city-state that rules America, and much of the rest of the world, in the way that Rome ruled the Roman Empire.
- Richard Maybury
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
- George Bernard Shaw
There are, however, some potentates I would kill by any and all means at my disposal. They are Ignorance, Superstition, and
Bigotry - the most sinister and tyrannical rulers on earth.
- Emma Goldman
I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas.
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the
consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony.
- Noam Chomsky
Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them.
- Aristotle
Freedom, morality, and the human dignity of the individual
consists precisely in this; that he does good not because he is forced to do so, but because he freely conceives it, wants it, and loves it.
- Mikhail Bakunin
He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.
- Charles Peguy
We who have a voice must speak for the voiceless.
- Oscar Romero
You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.
- Aldous Huxley
Each of us can practice rights ourselves, treating each other without discrimination, respecting each other's dignity and rights.
- Carol Bellamy
All that is left of America is banality and self-delusion.
- Noam Chomsky
In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own.
- Thomas Jefferson
Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.
- Henry David Thoreau
Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to
sustain it.
- Lysander Spooner
Do right and risk the consequences.
- Sam Houston
There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.
- Eli Wiesel
We who have a voice must speak for the voiceless.
- Archbishop Oscar Romero
I may be arrested, I may be tried and thrown into jail, but I never will be silent.
- Emma Goldman
The American people are free to do exactly what they are told.
- Ward Churchill
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Willful Ignorance is both a life and death sentence.
- James A. Zoppa
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion.
- Frank Zappa
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
- Frederick Douglass
The civil government … functions with complete success … by
the total separation of the Church from the State.
- James Madison
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
- George Orwell
I will not sleep until the whole world is awake.
- Anonymous
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
- Adrienne Rich
No religious doctrine shall be established by law.
- Elbridge Gerry
Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.
- Albert Einstein
Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.
- Mark Twain
Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious.
- Oscar Wilde
Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all others because you were born in it.
- George Bernard Shaw
When you invite people to think, you are inviting revolution.
- Ivana Gabara
When the people liberate their own minds and take a hard clear look at what the 1% is doing and what the 99% should be doing, then serious stuff begins to happen.
- Michael Parenti
The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it.
- Edward Dowling
It is in the nature of imperialism that citizens of the imperial power are always among the last to know--or care--about
circumstances in the colonies.
- Bertrand Russell
It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them.
- Adolph Hitler
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- George Orwell
He who is not angry when there is just cause for anger is immoral.
Why? Because anger looks to the good of justice. And if you can live amid injustice without anger, you are immoral as well as unjust.
- St. Thomas Aquinas
When men yield up the privilege of thinking, the last shadow of liberty quits the horizon.
- Thomas Paine
You are free to do what you want, but you are not free to want what you want.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled cannot be conscious.
- George Orwell
It is well that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.
- Henry Ford
Freedom without opportunity is a devil's gift, and the refusal to provide such opportunities is criminal.
- Noam Chomsky
Let me ask you this: Why were you happier when you were a kid?
Because you didn't know anything. The more you know, the
sadder you get.
- Stephen Colbert
You have freedom when you're easy in your harness.
- Robert Frost
Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our
politics.
- 9/11 Commission Report, pg. 376
Give me a lever large enough, and I will move the world.
- Archimedes
A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
- Oscar Wilde
I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure.
- Clarence Darrow
The mice will win in the end. But in the meantime, the cats will be well fed.
- Bruce Schneier
But a constitution of government, once changed from freedom, can never be restored. Liberty, once lost, is lost forever.
- John Adams (July 7, 1775)
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.
- Naomi Wolf
The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
- Lesley P. Hartley
Seek to gain the respect of others by improving on our
shortcomings.
- Martin Luther King
Leaders are needed all over this South, in every community, all over the nation: intelligent, courageous, dedicated leadership. Not leaders in love with money, but in love with justice; not leaders in love with publicity, but in love with humanity.
- Martin Luther King
Those who make revolution half way only dig their own graves.
- Louis de St. Just
Democracy [is] when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.
- Aristotle
If liberty and equality... are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the
government to the utmost.
- Aristotle
Excessive wealth in the hands of the few means extreme poverty, ignorance, vice, and wretchedness as the lot of the many
- Abraham Lincoln
You can jail the revolutionary, but you can't jail the revolution....
You can murder the liberator, but you can't murder liberation.
- Fred Hampton, Chicago Panther
All degraded and shameful practices eventually collect and
flourish in Rome.
- Tacitus
The welfare of the people is the supreme law.
- Cicero
A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for
modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic.
No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
- Aldous Huxley
The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the
prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.
- H.L. Mencken
Some of the greatest perils of democracy arise from the
fanaticism of moral idealists who are not conscious of the
corrupting self-interest in their professional ideals.
- Reinhold Niebuhr
If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought--not free for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.
- Oliver W. Holmes
Look... see there the bolts and bars of power; see bribery and corruption defiling the fairest fabric that ever human nature reared.
- Patrick Henry
Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
- William Blum
Capitalism is the theory that the worst people, acting from their worst motives, will somehow produce the most good.
- William Blum
Belief in myths allow the comfort of opinion without the
discomfort of thought.
- John F. Kennedy
Privileged groups seldom give up their privilege voluntarily.
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Those who control the past control the future.
- George Orwell
We are enriched not by what we possess, but by what we can do without.
- Immanuel Kant
The prerequisite for a good marriage, it seems to me, is the license to be unfaithful.
- Carl Jung
Oppression does not automatically produce a revolt nor is every rebellion successful: for the outcome depends upon the number, determination, and understanding of those who seek to break the shackles of tyranny.
- Martin A. Larson
I sincerely believe the banking institutions are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.
- Thomas Jefferson
Everything begins as mystique and ends as politics.
- Charles Peguy
All humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
- U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Don't bow before another person or another nation.
- Mahatma Gandhi
Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the
Constitution, however, both are neutral.
- Kenneth V. Lanning
We must not believe the many, who say that only free people
ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the
philosophers who say that only the educated are free.
- Epictetus
Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
- Latin proverb
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
- Robert H. Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court Justice
A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.
- Thomas Jefferson
These quotes originally appeared on Steve Dustcircle's political and human rights website, The Dissenting Heretic
[http://www.dustcircle.com], and were compiled over the years from books, articles and essays read by the editor.
About the Author:
Born in Chicago, Steve relocated a lot,
and finally landed in Columbus, OH.
Steve has his hand in many forms of
activism, mainly focusing on human
rights and free thought. Music also has
been a huge part of his life. On a small
scale, there's not much he hasn't done;
there is little that he hasn't read about.
Steve loves good coffee, cold lager, and
stimulating conversation.
Other books by Steve Dustcircle:
UnChristianed Nation: What Would a U.S. Christian Nation
Look Like?
Many Americans call themselves Christians,
and say that America is a Christian nation. This
book takes the Christian's own text--the Bible--
and turns it against them, showing U.S.
Christians that if America were indeed a
"Christian nation," the evidence isn't there.
Steve Dustcircle attacks the theocratic
mentality point by point, using everything
from the early Jewish civilization to the early
Church, and uses that as a mirror against the
ways America acts and thinks politically, spiritually, and
intellectually. America is far from being a Christian nation, and with rawness, Dustcircle pulls no blows.
Before Your First Gig
Many bands form quickly, jam out a few tunes,
write a song or two, and wish to immediately hit
the stage. This guide will help new bands
develop a plan to network, form an online
presence, and get their songs presentabl