“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

“First he sympathized with Cuba, then with China, and when the cruelty of their regimes began to appall him, he resigned himself with a sigh to a sea of words with no weight and no resemblance to life. ”

“It was one of those strange moments that came to him rarely, but never left. A moment that stamped itself on heart and brain, instantly recallable in every detail, for all of his life. There was no telling what made these moments different from any other, though he knew them when they came. He had seen sights more gruesome and more beautiful by far, and been left with no more than a fleeting muddle of their memory. But these-- the still moments, as he called them to himself-- they came with no warning, to print a random image of the most common things inside his brain, indelible.”

“As if when someone close to us dies, we momentarily trade places with them, in the moment right before. And as we get over it, we’re really living their life in reverse, from death to life, from sickness to health.”

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resigns his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.”

“The human being, whether he realises it or not, is trusting someone or something every moment of the day.”