Dissenting Quotes

#1. The dissenting opinions of one generation become the prevailing interpretation of the next.

Burton J. Hendrick

#2. Now I think that a true liberal will always prioritize individuals over the group, will always prioritize heresy over orthodoxy, will always prioritize the dissenting voice over the status quo.

Maajid Nawaz

#3. Dissenting opinions are useful even when they're wrong. So instead of speaking to highly agreeable audiences, target suggestions to people with a history of originality.

Adam Grant

#4. Why the critics, like a flock of ducks, always move in perfect unison: Their authority with the public depends upon an appearance of unanimous agreement. One dissenting voice would shatter the whole fragile structure.

Edward Abbey

#5. At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world.

Israel Shenker

#6. In a number of cases dissenting opinions have in time become the law.

Charles Evans Hughes

#7. Priestley, a brilliant man with an astonishing variety of talents, did not lack for career options. He was employed as a minister for a Dissenting church in Leeds, England. ("Dissenting" meant that it was not affiliated with the Church of England, the state-sanctioned religion.) But

Chip Heath

#8. Never ask who's right. Start out by asking what is right. And you find that out by listening to dissenting, disagreeing opinions.

Peter Drucker

#9. A dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority.

Eric Hoffer

#10. He's never quite got the trick of conversation, tending to hear in dissenting views, however mild, a kind of affront, an invitation to mortal combat.

Ian McEwan

#11. If you want criticisms, read the dissenting opinions of the Court. That will give you criticisms.

William Jennings Bryan

#12. This huge and terrible industry [the slave trade] was blessed by all churches and for a long time aroused absolutely no religious protest ... In the eighteenth century, a few dissenting Mennonites and Quakers in America began to call for abolition, as did some freethinkers like Thomas Paine.

Christopher Hitchens

#13. And when we take ourselves too seriously, we are grim about the brothers and sisters, especially the dissenting ones, and there will be no health in us and no healing humor.

Walter Brueggemann

#14. Democracy to me is letting the other person speak and being dissenting without being disagreeable.

Malachy McCourt

#15. We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.
[Osborn v. United States, 385 U.S. 323, 341 (1966) (dissenting)]

William O. Douglas

#16. There was in the House only one dissenting vote, from Barbara J. Lee, a Democrat from California, who warned that military action could not guarantee the safety of the country and that 'as we act, let us not become the evil we deplore.

Chris Hedges

#17. Intolerance is natural and logical, for in every dissenting opinion lies an assumption of superior wisdom.

Ambrose Bierce

#18. Some of the most valuable stuff I do has to do with my dissenting from the general opinion about people in movements.

Harvey Pekar

#19. Mutual commitment to ideals - yes; the stifling of all dissenting notions - no.

Norman Lamm

#20. It is ludicrous to believe that he meant nuclear weapons can be used. It is truly fearful to see how the mainstream media in the west can construct an adversary and that there are so few dissenting voices.

Mohammad Marandi

#21. An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.

Pankaj Mishra

#22. I wish to use the words of Justice Brandeis dissenting in Olmstead to speak for me. He wrote, 'Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.'

Timothy McVeigh

#23. One of the most effective tools that the Cheney-Bush junta has used to marginalize dissenting or even mildly inquisitive American citizens has been the accusation of being unpatriotic.

Viggo Mortensen

#24. Yesterday the greatest question was decided which ever was debated in America; and a greater perhaps never was, nor will be, decided among men. A resolution was passed without one dissenting colony, 'that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States.

John Adams

#25. My view is that good community management is like having good municipal government: You should be able to have dissenting opinions and so on, freedom of speech, but your grandmother should also be able to walk down the street at night without having to worry about getting mugged.

Jimmy Wales

#26. Unlike lions and dogs, we are a dissenting animal. We need to dissent in the same way that we need to travel, to make money, to keep a record of our time on earth and in dream, and to leave a permanent mark. Dissension is a drive, like those drives.

Carol Bly

#27. The right to be let alone is indeed the beginning of all freedom.
[Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak, 343 U.S. 451, 467 (1952) (dissenting)]

William O. Douglas

#28. In Cuba I have always understood harsh treatment of dissenting voices as stemming from a "siege situation" imposed upon it from outside. And I believe that to a certain extent that is true.

Harold Pinter

#29. The first opinion the Court ever filed has a dissenting opinion. Dissent is a tradition of this Court ... When someone is writing for the Court, he hopes to get eight others to agree with him, so many of the majority opinions are rather stultified.

William O. Douglas

#30. If liberalism is to mean anything at all, it is duty bound to support without hesitation the dissenting individual over the group, the heretic over the orthodox, innovation over stagnation, and free speech over offense.

Maajid Nawaz

#31. Being deeply knowledgeable on one subject narrows one's focus and increases confidence, but it also blurs dissenting views until they are no longer visible, thereby transforming data collection into bias confirmation and morphing self-deception into self-assurance.

Michael Shermer

#32. Women's studies is a comfy, chummy morass of unchallenged groupthink . It is, with rare exception, totally unscholarly. Academic feminists have silenced men and dissenting women.

Camille Paglia

#33. It is maintained that a society is free only when dissenting minorities have room to throw their weight around. As a matter of fact, a dissenting minority feels free only when it can impose its will on the majority: what it abominates most is the dissent of the majority. 41

Eric Hoffer

#34. Racial dialogues are microcosms of race relations in the United States; reenact the biases, prejudices, and stereotypes of the wider society; invalidate and punish dissenting voices; and force compliance on groups of color.

Derald Wing Sue

#35. I hope that nothing ever wussifies me to deny my own personal beliefs. Brainwashed wussies have been taught that standing up for yourself and defending your personal point of view makes you a close-minded hate monger. One must also be respectful of dissenting belief while supporting their own.

Brad Stine

#36. The chief characteristics of the tall building is that it is lofty. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation so that from bottom to top it should be a unit without a single dissenting line.

Louis Sullivan