Protest Quotes

I detect the activist returning with a vengence.

It's not an effective protest if it's not pissing people off.

A single whisper can be quite a disturbance when the rest of the audience is silent.

Say what you want but you NEVER say it with violence!

Protest is when I say I don't like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don't like. Protest is when I say I refuse to go along with this anymore. Resistance is when I make sure everybody else stops going along too.

Ulrike Marie Meinhof

I learned early that crying out in protest could accomplish things. My older brothers and sister had started to school when, sometimes, they would come in and ask for a buttered biscuit or something and my mother, impatiently, would tell them no. But I would cry out and make a fuss until I got what I wanted. I remember well how my mother asked me why I couldn't be a nice boy like Wilfred; but I would think to myself that Wilfred, for being so nice and quiet, often stayed hungry. So early in life, I had learned that if you want something, you had better make some noise.

Malcolm X

We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Elie Wiesel

One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly.

Mahatma Gandhi

If I were to remain silent, I'd be guilty of complicity.

Albert Einstein

An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law

Martin Luther King Jr.

I'm all for fighting tyranny and oppression.

E.A. Bucchianeri

I don't know about you, but I only have one life, and I don't want to spend it in a sewer of injustice.

Wallace Shawn

At least I had frost on my nose, boots on my feet, and protest in my mouth.

Jack Kerouac

I am a Dalit in Khairlanji. A Pandit in the Kashmir valley. A Sikh in 1984. I am from the North East of India when I am in Munirka. I am a Muslim in Gujarat; a Christian in Kandhamal. A Bihari in Maharashtra. A Delhi-wallah in Chennai. A woman in North India. A Hindi-speaker in Assam. A Tamilian in MP. A villager in a big city. A confused man in an indifferent world. We're all minorities.We all suffer; we all face discrimination. It is only us resisting this parochialism when in the position of majoritarian power that makes us human. I hope that one day, I can just be an Indian in India - only then can I be me.

Sami Ahmad Khan

Bolivian women sewed their lips shut for days. They threaded needles through their skin to stop their speech, to show what good speaking had done them.

Leslie Jamison

Human rights is a numbers game. Who is going to care if only 20 people pitch for a protest?

Christina Engela

Poets can't march in protest or do that sort of thing. I feel that's against the rules, and pointless. If mankind wants a great big final bang, that's what it'll get. One should never protest against anything unless it's going to have an effect. None of those marches do. One should either be silent or go straight to the top.

Robert Graves

Patriotism means to stand by the country. It does not mean to stand by the president or any other public official.

Theodore Roosevelt

I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

James Baldwin

A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.

Edward Abbey

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Barbara Ehrenreich

They were really willing to pay to avoid any trouble. No doubt they had overestimated the ability of academics to make a nuisance of themselves. It had been years since an academic title gained you access to major media.... Even if all the university professors in France had risen up in protest, almost nobody would have noticed, but apparently they hadn't found that out in Saudi Arabia. They still believed, deep down, in the power of the intellectual elite. It was almost touching.

Michel Houellebecq

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.

William Lloyd Garrison

And then they started deleting the protest reviews.That was my line. When they started to stamp out dissent, actually to make it disappear with virtually no excuse for doing so...that’s not neglect. That’s not an overwhelmed person or people trying to figure it out. That’s an entity that has decided that they do not care, that they have moved on from the issue, do not see it as an issue, and is trying to avoid bad press. Or they are too far down the line to backtrack on what they’ve been doing and save face. They’re content with their wildly inconsistent policy enough to no longer care what effect it is having on their user base. If you try to silence dissent, then something is very, very wrong.

G.R. Reader

Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?

Paolo Freire

The power of the people is much stronger than the people in power

Wael Ghonim

The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.

George Orwell

Sometimes a citizenry should not simply "be good". You have to leave space for dissent, real dissent.

Sherry Turkle

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.""Its own grave-diggers," he said."But these are not the grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are a fantasy generated by the market. They don't exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside."The camera tracked a cop chasing a young man through the crowd, an image that seemed to exist at some drifting distance from the moment."The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

Don DeLillo

Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power than can transform the world.

Howard Zinn

We did not hesitate to call our movement an army. But it was a special army, with no supplies but its sincerity, no uniform but its determination, no arsenal except its faith, no currency but its conscience.

Martin Luther King Jr.

Any government's condemnation of terrorism is only credible if it shows itself to be responsive to persistent, reasonable, closely argued, non-violent dissent. And yet, what's happening is just the opposite. The world over, non-violent resistance movements are being crushed and broken. If we do not respect and honour them, by default we privilege those who turn to violent means.

Arundhati Roy

We will martyr ourselves, suffering under the weight of a non-reciprocal relationship until some part of us bursts in protest. Suddenly, we lose our mind, and allowing ourselves to heap all manner of nastiness, name calling, patronizing, death threats on the “deserving” jerk who has it coming after all we do for him/her! As the final insult rings across the room and we regain consciousness, we are horrified by what has come out of our mouth. After all, we LOVE these people, and we quickly move into anxious terror that this time we have gone too far . . . this time we crossed the line and they will leave us. So, we hunker back down and the martyrdom begins again. It’s a terrible cycle.

Mary Crocker Cook

Every rock or molotov cocktail thrown should make a very obvious political point. Random violence produces random propaganda results. Why waste even a rock?

Abbie Hoffman

In protesting for your rights in any form you may, but it's only good, If they can understand your problems and feelings and not only to judge you.

Auliq-Ice

You can write the most detailed, vivid description of an ax entering a skull, and nobody will say a word in protest. But if you write a similarly detailed description of a penis entering a vagina, you get letters from people saying they'll never read you again. What the hell? Penises entering vaginas bring a lot more joy into the world than axes entering skulls.

George R.R. Martin

The first drops of rain started to fall.'God's policemen,' said Jester. 'You what?' 'The police always used to pray for rain before any big demonstration because people wouldn't turn up. Nobody wants to run riot in the streets if it's pouring with rain. Who's going to want to fight in this?

Charlie Higson

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevit

John F Kennedy

If outrage were a sign of godliness, then the devil would be the godliest soul in Creation.

Russell D. Moore

Justice has a right to protest against injustice.

Kristian Goldmund Aumann

To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Without debate, without criticism no administration and no country can succeed and no republic can survive.

John F Kennedy

It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember.

Alan Moore

Nothing strengthens authority so much as silence.

Leonardo da Vinci

Dramatic uprising of stupidity can start from nowhere and only be seen when it reaches it's climax.

Auliq-Ice

If you must give me a label, then label me a human being. I have no pride in being a human, though, because I have nothing to do with my becoming one.But, whereas animals don't have a rational code of ethics, I like to think I do. Which is where I am partisan. Moral partisanship is the reason for my "anger." And if I don't protest what needed to be protested, I might just as well be an animal.

Paul Krassner

They tell me to be quietWhen I’d rather cause a riotAnd have everyone screamingOut their eccentric meaning.

Initially NO

We've got to make change our national pastime and hold protests more regularly than weekend parties.

Rivera Sun

Either offend or represent, don’t be a spectator.

Pradeepa Pandiyan

To spend one's life being angry, and in the process doing nothing to change it, is to me ridiculous. I could be mad all day long, but if I'm not doing a damn thing, what difference does it make?

Charles Fuller

So I think that a protest,' she went on, 'like a work of dance or a work of music, is something done, at least in part, by the protestor for the protestor.'She saw I was about to interrupt so said, 'One more minute. Let me explain. Of course one hopes and plans for impact, for audience, for change, for efficacy. But, like dance, like music, a protest can be a religious ritual too, one that needn't be derisively looked down upon as magical thinking, but a spiritual act where the act itself is the goal. And that act may on some level be co-opted, but in the subjective world of the protestor it is a way, in itself, to be. Even in solipsism, the subject can be moral. You can call it hokum if you wish, but for the protestor, the protest makes a moral world in which she can abide.

Eugene Lim

Confrontation is not bad. Goodness is supposed to confront evil.

Fred Shuttlesworth

Originality is the best form of rebellion.

Mike Sasso

The revolution has no leader, I said. It was more like a raging wild horse that would buck anyone who tried to mount it against its will.

Wael Ghonim

Nowadays, a simple faulty brake light traffic stop, can get a black person killed. It's better to fix the broken light bulb, then having to face and cooperate with a senseless police officer.

Anthony Liccione

If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality.

Desmond Tutu

During the flames of controversy, opinions, mass disputes, conflict, and world news, sometimes the most precious, refreshing, peaceful words to hear amidst all the chaos are simply and humbly 'I don't know.

Criss Jami

But I believe that, once the shock settles, faith and energy will return. Because let’s be real: we always knew this shit wasn’t going to be easy. Colonial power, patriarchal power, capitalist power must always and everywhere be battled, because they never, ever quit. We have to keep fighting, because otherwise there will be no future—all will be consumed. Those of us whose ancestors were owned and bred like animals know that future all too well, because it is, in part, our past. And we know that by fighting, against all odds, we who had nothing, not even our real names, transformed the universe. Our ancestors did this with very little, and we who have more must do the same. This is the joyous destiny of our people—to bury the arc of the moral universe so deep in justice that it will never be undone.

Junot Díaz

New concepts should be introduced by the power of imagery.

Douglas Coop

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Protest Quotes

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