"The cost to the good people for their indifference to their public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."
- Plato
* * *
"They will do whatever we let them get away with."
- Joseph Heller
* * *
"There are some natures which never grow large enough to speak out and say a bad act is a bad act,
until they have inquired into the politics or the nationality of the man who did it...."
- Mark Twain
* * *
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
- Martin Luther King Jr.
* * *
"The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing."
- Albert Einstein
* * *
"The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them. That is the essence of
inhumanity."
- George Bernard Shaw
* * *
"We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the
appalling silence of the good people."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
* * *
"Moderation in temper is always a virtue; moderation in principle is always a vice."
- Thomas Paine
* * *
"To know and not to do is not to know"
- Chinese saying
* * *
"Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be
neutral."
- Paulo Friere
* * *
"Contrary to popular belief, conventional wisdom would have one believe that it is insane to resist this,
the mightiest of empires.... But what history really shows is that today's empire is tomorrow's ashes, that nothing lasts
forever, and that to not resist is to acquiesce in your own oppression. The greatest form of sanity that anyone can
exercise is to resist that force that is trying to repress, oppress, and fight down the human spirit."
- Mumia Abu-Jamal
* * *
"There is substantial evidence that the fear of domestic disruption has inhibited murderous plans.
One documented case concerns Vietnam.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff recognized the need that 'sufficient forces would still be available for civil disorder control.'
if they sent troops to Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, and Pentagon officials feared that escalation might lead to massive
civil disobedience, in view of the large-scale popular opposition to the war, running the risk of 'provoking a domestic
crisis of unprecented proportions.' A review of the internal documents released in the Pentagon Papers shows that
considerations of cost were the sole factor inhibiting planners, a fact that should be noted by citizens concerned to
restrain the violence of the state. In such cases as these, and many others, popular demonstrations and civil disobedience
may, under appropriate circumstances, encourage others to undertake a broader range of conventional action by extending
the range of the thinkable, and where there is real popular understanding of the legitimacy of direct action to confront
institutional violence, may serve as a catalyst to constructive organization and action that will pave the way to more
fundamental change."
- Noam Chomsky
* * *
"Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed."
- Abraham Lincoln
* * *
"Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
They want rain without thunder and lightning. ...Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.
...Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them;
and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
- Frederick Douglass, 1849
* * *
"The citizen's job is to be rude--to pierce the comfort of professional intercourse by boorish expressions of doubt."
- John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion
* * *
"The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive."
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, February 22, 1787
* * *
"The magic word before whose power
Even the people's masters cower,
Flapping their wigs officiously--
Prick up your ears; the word--it is publicity."
- Late 18th Century German verse
* * *
"The govenment has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs, even when
those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile foreign power... Groups and individuals
have been harassed and disrupted because of their political views and their lifestyles."
- The Church Committee Report, 1975
* * *
"Regardless of the unattractiveness or noisy militancy of some private citizens or organizations, the Constitution does not
permit federal interference with their activities except throught the criminal justice system, armed with it's ancient
safeguards. There are no exceptions. No federal agency, the CIA, the IRS, the FBI, can be at the same time policeman,
prosecutor, judge and jury. That is what constitutionally guaranteed due process is all about. It may sometimes be
disorderly and unsatisfactory to some, but it is the essence of freedom... I suggest that the philosophy supporting
COINTELPRO is the subversive notion that any public official, the President, or a policeman, possesses a kind of inherent
power to set aside the Constitution whenever he thinks the public interest, or "national security" warrants it. That
notion is a postulate of tyranny."
- Congressman Don Edwards, 1975
* * *
"If people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny."
- Thomas Jefferson
* * *
"Critical thinking is compatible with patriotism... Amnesia is not a requirement for patriotism... We must not confuse
dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think, the soul of America dies with it."
- Edward R. Murrow
* * *
"The most serious threat to democracy is the notion that it has already been achieved."
- Author unknown
* * *
"To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see everyday, is perhaps the most
difficult act of heroism you can perform."
- Theodore H White
* * *
"If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual."
- Frank Herbert
* * *
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that
ever has."
- Margaret Meade
* * *
"Snowflakes are one of nature's most fragile things, but look at what they can do it they stick together."
- Vista M Kelly
* * *
"If you give me a fish, you have feed me for a day. If you teach me to fish, then you have fed me until
the river is contaminated or the shore line seized for development. But if you teach me to organize, then whatever the
challenge I can join together with my peers and we will fashion our own solution."
- Ricardo Levins Morales
* * *
"We who have a Voice must be a Voice for the Voiceless!"
- Oscar Romero, 1980
* * *
"When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist."
- Helder Camara
* * *
"Woe betide that man of power who takes the side of those who have no power."
- St Augustine
* * *
"Why should workers agree to be slaves in a basically authoritarian structure?
They should have control over it themselves.
Why shouldn’t communities have a dominant voice in running the institutions that affect their lives?"
- Noam Chomsky
* * *
"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few.
The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. ...
The hand entrusted with power becomes either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people.
Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot;
only by un-intermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in
material prosperity ..
Never look, therefore for an age when the people can be quiet and safe.
At such times Despotism like a shrouding mist, steals over the mirrior of Freedom...
As health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through roil, so there is no republican road to safety
but in constant distrust..."
- Wendell Phillips.
* * *
"The outcome of today's struggles does not matter. It does not matter in the final count that one or two movements were
temporarily defeated because what is definite is the decision to struggle which matures every day, the consciousness of
the need for revolutionary change, and the certainty that it is possible."
- Ernesto "Che" Guevara
* * *
"What is hateful...is not rebellion but the despotism which induces the rebellion;
what is hateful are not rebels but the men, who, having the enjoyment of power, do not discharge the duties of power;
they are the men who, having the power to redress wrongs, refuse to listen to the petitioners that are sent to them;
they are the men who, when they are asked for a loaf, give a stone."
- Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Speech in the House of Commons(Canada), 16 March 1886
* * *
"The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naive and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes
his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not
a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair."
- H.L. Mencken
* * *
"To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing."
- Raymond Williams
* * *
"Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love.…
Above all, always be capable of feeling any injustice committed against anyone anywhere in the world."
- Che Guevara
* * *
"Those who attack the rationale of the game, and not the players, are it's most formidable adversaries."
- James J. Martin
* * *
"There are two ways not to suffer from the inferno we are all living in every day. The first suits most people:
accept the inferno and become part of it to the point where you don't even see it any more. The second is riskier
and requires constant attention and willingness to learn: seek out and know how to recognize whoever and whatever,
in the midst of the inferno, is not inferno, and help them last, give them space."
- Italo Calvino
* * *
"He who is morally impressed by power is never in a critical mood, and he is never a revolutionary character."
- Erich Fromm
* * *
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- George Bernard Shaw
* * *
"I would like to believe that people have an instinct for freedom, that they really want to control their own affairs.
They don’t want to be pushed around, ordered, oppressed, etc., and they want a chance to do things that make sense,
like constructive work in a way they control, or maybe control together with others.
I don’t know any way to prove this.
It’s really a hope about what human beings are like, a hope that if social structures change sufficiently,
those aspects of human nature will be realized."
- Noam Chomsky
* * *
"The most heroic word in all languages is revolution."
- Eugene Debs
* * *
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can excercise their constitutional right of amending it, or excercise their revolutionary right to overthrow it."
- Abraham Lincoln
* * *
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
* * *
"I will probably go to jail, but do you know what? There's a lot of good people who go to jail."
- Rep. James Traficant, July 19, 2002
* * *
"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."
- John F. Kennedy, speech, September 25, 1961
* * *
"The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the
press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in and keep step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of
command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent."
- Charles Eliot Norton, True Patriotism, 1898
* * *
"Every intellectual revolution which has ever stirred humanity into greatness has been a passionate protest against inert
ideas."
- Alfred North Whitehead, The Aims of Education, 1929
* * *
"Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dared to
dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, we may never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech, May 31, 1954
* * *
"We protest solemnly in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor. In independence we
seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the states with which we have lately been confederated.
All we ask is to be let alone – that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms. This
we will, we must resist to the direst extremity. The moment that this pretension is abandoned, the sword will drop from our
grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amnesty and commerce that cannot but be mutually beneficial. So long
as this pretension is maintained, with a firm reliance on that Divine Power which covers with its protection the just cause,
we must continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence, and self government."
– President Jefferson Davis' first address to the Confederate Congress
* * *
"The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a
speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it's invalid on its face."
– Potter Stewart (1915-1985), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Walker v. Birmingham, 1967
* * *
"If a law is unjust, a man is not only right to disobey it, he is obligated to do so."
– Thomas Jefferson
* * *
