Albert Camus Quotes

Thought that is silenced is always rebellious.

Alas, how many have been persecuted for the wrong of having been right?

You can destroy those who speak the truth, but you cannot destroy the truth itself

Suppressing ideas never makes them go away.

Heretics have been hated from the beginning of recorded time; they have been ostracized, exiled, tortured, maimed, and butchered; but it has generally proved impossible to smother them; and when it has not, the society that has succeeded has always declined.

Even if the country is run by a Mussolini, free speech will find its way.

Once you start choking the space for dissent in a democracy, people feel pushed to the wall and then it leads to further dissent and alienation.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

Down through the centuries, this trick has been tried by various establishments throughout the world. They force people to get involved in the kind of examination that has only one aim and that is to stamp out dissent.

The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.

Intellectuals try to keep going. But their situation is very difficult. Those who have had the courage to voice their opposition have often paid a very high price.

In contrast, fear societies are societies in which dissent is banned.

Break up the printing presses and you break up rebellion.

I want to tell stories powerful people don't want you to tell. It's not worth getting out of bed otherwise.

People may believe that there can be a society where dissent is not permitted, but which is nonetheless not a fear society because everyone agrees with one another and therefore no one wants to dissent.

Some people still believe you should just fall in line with what's going on - and that's scary. It makes a mockery of freedom of speech.

Till people find themselves greatly abused and oppressed by their governors, they are not apt to complain; and whenever they do, in fact, find themselves thus abused and oppressed, they must be stupid not to complain.

A man can submit today in order to resist tomorrow. My submission had been such. And because I had not been free to show my real feeling, to voice my true thoughts, my submission had bred bitterness and anger. And there were nearly ten million others who had submitted with equal anger and bitterness.

It is difficult to violently suppress people in the long run, as the example of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European countries has shown.

One writes fables in periods of oppression.

This power, this authority, Soviet power: they killed everybody who could make any resistance, who could explain his own way of thinking and who could follow his own way of thinking, of believing.

There's a tradition in the history of dissent in authoritarian countries of a certain kind of dissident, and their form of dissent is to live their lives as normally as possible.

If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.

The seed of revolution is repression.

Repression or oppression never yet succeeded in crushing the truth or redressing a wrong.