Rebellion Against Tyranny Quotes & Sayings

So books are real to me, too; they link me not just with other minds but with the vision of other minds, what those minds understand and see. I see their worlds as well as I see my own. — Philip K. Dick

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.
Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender. — Howard Zinn

I think most religious people experience just as much doubt as they do faith; they just don't admit it. (13) — Elna Baker

To the extent that one is responsible for one's life, one is alone. — Irvin D. Yalom

We'll have for a president a symbolic Rebel against his own power whose election was underwritten by inhuman soulless profit-machines whose takeover of American civic and spiritual life will convince Americans that rebellion against the soulless inhumanity of corporate life will consist in buying products from corporations that do the best job of representing corporate life as empty and soulless. We'll have a tyranny of conformist nonconformity presided over by a symbolic outsider whose very election depended on our deep conviction that his persona is utter bullshit. A rule of image, which because it's so empty makes everyone terrified - they're small and going to die, after all - — David Foster Wallace

A ruler who discerning justice refuseth to it the sanction of law, demanding abnegation of rights and self-sacrifice, will not drive his subjects to these virtues, virtuous only if free, but by unnaturally making justice unlawful, will drive them rather to rebellion against all law. — J.R.R. Tolkien

What makes one Sumerian city better than another one? A bigger ziggurat? A
better football team?"
"Better me."
"What are me?"
"Rules or principles that control the operation of society, like a code of laws,
but on a more fundamental level."
"I don't get it."
"That is the point. Sumerian myths are not 'readable' or 'enjoyable' in the
same sense that Greek and Hebrew myths are. They reflect a fundamentally
different consciousness from ours. — Neal Stephenson

It slowly dawned on the volunteers that they were not patients but subjects; separated from their friends and community in Kalaupapa, they felt like outcasts among outcasts. — Alan Brennert

He's spent all his life in good-natured rebellion against the tyranny of the unimportant. — Robin Hardy

Invoking nature with its implied supremacy ignores that many cultures have fundamentally differing ideas of even what nature is, much less how it should work. — Gregory Benford