Early on, he realized that revolutions don’t require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brushfires in people’s minds.
Diane Ackerman on Samuel Adams (“The Man Who Made a Revolution,” Parade, September 6, 1987), in a quote variants of which are often misattributed to Sam Adams.
Courage, then, my countrymen, our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Sam Adams, Speech, State House of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (August 1, 1776).
Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1949).
Sadly, I’ve spent the last few years working for Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda, and I’m very ashamed of this. Ashamed that I allowed lies to be broadcast from TV screens. Ashamed that I allowed others to zombify Russian people. We were silent in 2014 when all this started. We didn’t protest when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhuman regime at work. And now the whole world has turned its back on us. And the next ten generations won’t wash away the stain of this fratricidal war. We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It’s in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t lock us all away.
Marina Ovsyannikova, pre-recorded statement explaining her on-air protest against the invasion of Ukraine.
Le vrai est trop simple, il faut y arriver toujours par le compliqué.
The truth is too simple: one must always get there by a complicated route.
Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, aka, George Sand, Letter to Armand Barbès, (May 12, 1867), published in Georges Lubin (ed.) Correspondance (Paris: Garnier Freres, 1964-95) vol. 20, p. 412; Bruce Kajewski Traveling with Hermes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) p. 32.
The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another.
Ilana Mercer, reported in “Quacking Over Ducksters As Freedoms Go Poof,” WorldNetDaily.com, January 3, 2014.
Our Taiwan road is “a road of democracy, a road of freedom, a road of human rights, and a road of peace for Taiwan.” Taiwan is our country. Our country should not be bullied, dwarfed, marginalized, and localized.
Speech (August 5, 2002), by Chen Shui-bian, former president of Taiwan (2000-2008).
Men who have gained a high official position in universities and academies are often actuated by a jealousy very similar to that which we have traced among ecclesiastics. They establish a certain scientific orthodoxy, based often to a great extent on mere conjecture and assertion, and seek to frown down and to silence the unknown outsider who calls in question one of their dogmas, or who discovers a truth which they have overlooked. That any region of research should be officially tabooed is a humiliating circumstance. The dread of truth, the jealousy of discovery, is not confined to the Holy Inquisition, and no disestablishment of churches, no secularization of schools and colleges, not even the suppression of every religion — were such a step possible — would put an end to its action.
J.W. Slater, “The Martyrdom of Science,” Popular Science Monthly (Vol. XVII, May 1880).
I am innocent, and I am not suicidal. If I did this, then it means that I stuck my fist in the fears of Black Americans in this country for over 400 years and the fears of the LGBT community. Your honor, I respect you and I respect the jury. But I did not do this, and I am not suicidal — and if anything happens to me when I go in there, I did not do it to myself. And you must all know that.
Jussie Smollett, upon being sentenced to jail time (as well as $120,106 restitution to the city of Chicago and a $25,000 fine) on March 10, 2022.
Prior to his court-exiting outbursts, the judge had said:
Let me tell you Mr. Smollett, I know that there is nothing that I will do here today that can come close to the damage you’ve already done to your own life. You’ve turned your life upside down by your misconduct and shenanigans, you’ve destroyed your life as you knew it, and there’s nothing that any sentencing judge could do to you that can compare to the damage you’ve already caused yourself.
You’re just a charlatan pretending to be a victim of a hate crime, and that’s shameful.
Judge James Linn, in the sentencing hearing of Jussie Smollett, March 10, 2022.
Though the boys throw stones at frogs in sport, yet the frogs do not die in sport but in earnest.
As quoted by Plutarch.