Sedition Quotes

“If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy ... to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous ... let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb."

[Letter Addressed To The Addressers On The Late Proclamation, 1792 (Paine's response to the charge of "seditious libel" brought against him after the publication of The Rights of Man)]”
― Thomas Paine, The Thomas Paine Reader

“This is the week,
the primetime hearings on insurrection
and sedition,
our last chance to make known
and believed
the ugly truth of our last president,
the nefarious doings of his cohorts,
the insanity we all witnessed and went through,
the coup we just barely avoided.

It's now or never.

The jury is out,
the jury of public opinion.

The jury is us.”
― Shellen Lubin

“I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.'

I thought to myself, 'Too late for what?”
― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

“He had an AM radio playing a conservative talk show. The host was making some very interesting statements about the president. I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but from what the man said, I had to believe that sometime in the recent past the laws regarding sedition must have changed.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dexter's Final Cut

“The matter of sedition is of two kinds: much poverty and much discontentment....The causes and motives of sedition are, innovation in religion; taxes; alteration of laws and customs; breaking of privileges; general oppression; advancement of unworthy persons, strangers; dearths; disbanded soldiers; factions grown desperate; and whatsoever in offending people joineth them in a common cause.' The cue of every leader, of course, is to divide his enemies and to unite his friends. 'Generally, the dividing and breaking of all factions...that are adverse to the state, and setting them at a distance, or at least distrust, among themselves, is not one of the worst remedies; for it is a desperate case, if those that hold with the proceeding of the state be full of discord and faction, and those that are against it be entire and united.' A better recipe for the avoidance of revolutions is an equitable distribution of wealth: 'Money is like muck, not good unless it be spread.' But this does not mean socialism, or even democracy; Bacon distrusts the people, who were in his day quite without access to education; 'the lowest of all flatteries is the flattery of the common people;' and 'Phocion took it right, who, being applauded by the multitude, asked, What had he done amiss?' What Bacon wants is first a yeomanry of owning farmers; then an aristocracy for administration; and above all a philosopher-king. 'It is almost without instance that any government was unprosperous under learned governors.' He mentions Seneca, Antonius Pius and Aurelius; it was his hope that to their names posterity would add his own.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers

“As it drew nearer, excitement grew intense. Swarms of adventurers expecting the overthrow of the Government crowded into Washington.”
― Thomas Dixon Jr., The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan