Benjamin Spock Quotes

You can't disobey the rules every time you disapprove. However, when you're considering something that constitutes an extreme abridgement of your rights, conscience is the court of last resort.

In some ways, it is easier to be a dissident, for then one is without responsibility.

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.

Christ was crucified for preaching without a police permit

I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions, as not to discourage them too much. It is medicine necessary for the sound health of government.

...the right to free expression is something one seizes, not something one is given.... if it does exist, it exists to be used against the established order.... There is absolute opposition between the artist and the state.

The people shall not be deprived or abridged of their right to speak, or to publish their sentiments; and the freedom of the press, as one of the great bulwarks of liberty, shall be inviolable.

I'll be so presidential that you people will be screaming loosen up president. Loosen up.

Take the word Liberty from human speech and all the other words become poor, withered, meaningless sounds - but with that word realized - with that word understood, the world becomes a paradise.

Burn my Flag and I will shoot you........but I'll shoot you with a lot of love, like a good American

Silence does not equal patriotism. Obedience is not the American way.

I wish to suggest that ample opportunity does exist for dissent, for protest, and for nonconformity. But I must also say that the right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.

As you look at me and listen to me, please remember the often repeated truth that one prisoner of conscience is one too many.

Blasphemy and sedition (meaning the truth about Church and State).

The highest form of patriotism is dissent.

A person always has a chance to protest this or that.

[Louis Brandeis] believes in natural rights of speech and liberty and the right to pursue happiness.

In a democratic society, the only treason is silence.

Individual civil disobedience was everybody's inherent right, like the right of self-defence in normal life.

It is hard to imagine, but in a Maryland school, a 13- year old girl was arrested for refusing to say the pledge of allegiance. There is more at work than stupidity and a flight from responsibility on the part of educators, parents and politicians who maintain these laws, there is also the growing sentiment that young people constitute a threat to adults and that the only way to deal with them is to subject them to mind-crushing punishment.

One of the great things about our democracy is it expresses itself in all sorts of ways. And that includes people protesting. I've been the subject of protests during the course of my eight years and I suspect that there's not a president in our history that at some point hasn't been subject to these protests.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

You can wave your signs in protest against America taking stands. The stands America's taken are the reason that you can.

Those whose conscience demands that they defy authority in some ways that involve great consequences must be willing to accept some penalty.