Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.

We know from painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must 
be demanded by the oppressed.

All martyrs of religious faiths, of freedom and of science have had to disobey those who wanted to muzzle them in order to obey their own consciences, the laws of humanity and of reason. ... At this point in history, the capacity to doubt, to criticize and to disobey may be all that stands between a future for mankind and the end of the civilization.

To think of disobedient minorities as rebels and traitors is against the letter and spirit of the Constitution whose framers were especially sensitive to the dangers of unbridled majority rule.

The only person who is still private in Germany is somebody who is asleep.

If, as it seems, we are in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, free, human individual would be: cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities.

It's an oppressive organization now controlled by one percent of corporate America. Corporate America is using police forces as their mercenaries.

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid 'dens of crime' that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.

There are always risks in challenging excessive police power, but the risks of not challenging it are more dangerous, even fatal.

What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.