We may be so eager to protect the right to dissent that we lose sight of the difference between dissent and subversion.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity.
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels - men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Well, dissent is the tradition in America, and I've been on the side of dissent a good bit of my career, particularly in the last many years of the Republican Congress.
In the end it is worse to suppress dissent than to run the risk of heresy.
Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.
Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.
Dissents speak to a future age.
The aspects of patriotism that hush dissent, encourage going along, and sanction comfortable distancing and compliance with what is indecent and unacceptable... those aspects are too fundamental to ignore or gloss over.
May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.