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Many a man's strength is in opposition, and when he faileth, he grows out of use.
-Francis Bacon
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Opposition is true friendship.
-William Blake
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He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill. Our antagonist is our helper. This amicable conflict with difficulty helps us to an intimate acquaintance with our object, and compels us to consider it in all its relations. It will not suffer us to be superficial.
-Edmund Burke
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I stood among them, but not of them; in a shroud of thoughts which were not their thoughts.
-Lord (George Gordon) Byron
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Resistance is thought transformed into feeling. Change the thought that creates the resistance, and there is no more resistance.
-Robert Conklin
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Assent -- and you are sane -- , demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- , and handled with a Chain -- .
-Emily Dickinson
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No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate.
-Benjamin Disraeli
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Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world; and the world of women must stay narrow, or the woman is an outlaw. No woman could be Nietzsche or Rimbaud without ending up in a whorehouse or lobotomized.
-Andrea Dworkin
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Everything you are against weakens you. Everything you are for empowers you.
-Wayne Dyer
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May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
-George Eliot
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Men are not against you; they are merely for themselves.
-Gene Fowler
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I love opposition that has convictions.
-Frederick the Great
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Opposition is not necessarily enmity; it is merely misused and made an occasion for enmity.
-Sigmund Freud
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I respect only those who resist me; but I cannot tolerate them.
-Charles De Gaulle
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I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I'm a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I've always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself.
-Antonio Gramsci
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When you run into someone who is disagreeable to others, you may be sure he is uncomfortable with himself; the amount of pain we inflict upon others is directly proportional to the amount we feel within us.
-Sydney J. Harris
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You do not become a dissident just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility, combined with a complex set of external circumstances. You are cast out of the existing structures and placed in a position of conflict with them. It begins as an attempt to do your work well, and ends with being branded an enemy of society.
-Vaclav Havel
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It is hard for any one to be an honest politician who is not born and bred a Dissenter.
-William Hazlitt
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The beginning of thought is in disagreement -- not only with others but also with ourselves.
-Eric Hoffer
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One-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.
-Robert Francis Kennedy
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The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.
-Walter Lippmann
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If you have learned how to disagree without being disagreeable, then you have discovered the secrete of getting along -- whether it be business, family relations, or life itself.
-Bernard Meltzer
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If we confuse dissent with disloyalty
-Edward R. Murrow
Ford Fiftieth Anniversary Show, CBS and NBC (June 1953)
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I have spent many years of my life in opposition and I like the role.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
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Books about Dissent
