Henry Steele Commager Quotes

Today, whether it is a student who holds a sit-in to get the army recruiters off his campus, or the mother of a dead soldier who refuses to leave the front gate of the president's ranch, we continue to be saved by brave people who risk ridicule and rejection but end up turning huge tides of public opinion in the direction of righteousness. We owe them enormous debts of gratitude. It is not easy to stand up for what is right, especially when everyone else is afraid to leave the comfortable path of conformity.

The highest form of patriotism is dissent.

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.

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.

Civil disobedience is not something outside the realm of democracy. Democracy requires civil disobedience. Without civil disobedience democracy does not exist.

It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights--even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down.

There is no democracy without dissent.

It is dissent from government policies which defines the true Patriot

I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

It is people's willingness to take personal risks and confront the powerful by daring to speak the truth, not the truth itself, that ultimately leads to change.

I do not know of any salvation for society except through eccentrics, misfits, dissenters, people who protest.

I don't want to be a dissident. But in the same time, I don't want to go back home and be silent again.

Change comes when people are willing to commit acts of peaceful civil disobedience.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.

For years, decades, the system has taught us to stay quiet. They've made us believe that those who take to the streets to speak up are crazy, criminals, troublemakers.

I marched and I protested against the war in Vietnam, along with many, many thousands of others. But I never quite understood the bombs that were placed in science labs or office buildings.

A little rebellion is a good thing.

...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.

Cast your whole vote, not a piece of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless when it conforms to a majority; but is irresistable when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.

We, the Desaparecidos, are perfectly prepared for people to hate what we're saying or not like what we're saying.

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even tacitly take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Where's the activism? Nobody knows. And anyone who thinks they know, like Todd Gitlin, has their head up their ass. Nobody knows. The day before every revolution that's ever happened, that revolution was impossible. The day before Rosa Parks, that was impossible. The day after, it was inevitable.

Disobedience is the vehicle of progress.