Revolutionary Words from Three Millennia of Rebellion and Resistance
An anthology of quotes and excerpts to commemorate Verso’s 40th anniversary.

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—rallying others around them or, sometimes, inspiring uprisings many years later. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Cairo to Moscow and New York City.

This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent should be in the arsenal of every rebel who understands that words and ideas are the ultimate weapons.

Verso Books is a publishing house based in London and New York City, founded in 1970 by the staff of New Left, and originally known as New Left Books. Tariq Ali, who wrote this book’s preface, was one of the central authors for Verso from the early days.

Paperback, published in 2020, 416 pages.

I’ve just selected some chunks from the huge list of quotes below, just so you can get an idea:

ca. 1800 BCE: Anonymous

ca. 700 BCE: Hesiod

ca. 590 BCE: Sappho

ca. 522 BCE: Herodotus

ca. 500s BCE: Sumangalamata

ca. 415 BCE: Thucydides

399 BCE: Plato

ca. 300 BCE: Qu Yuan

ca. 200 BCE: Thiruvalluvar

ca. 100 BCE: Anonymous

ca. 95 BCE: Sima Qian

63 BCE: Sallust

ca. 83 CE: Tacitus

ca. 150: Spartacus

[…]

1845: Friedrich Engels

1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

1849: Henry David Thoreau

1850: Alexander Herzen

1850: Walt Whitman

1851: Sojourner Truth

1852: Frederick Douglass

1852: Elizabeth Oakes Smith

1855: Santhal Rebellion

1855: Muktabai

1856: Du Wenxiu

1858: Tanyus Shahin

1858: Rani Lakshmibai

1859: John Brown

1860: Giuseppe Garibaldi

1865: Ira Steward

1866: Mikhail Bakunin

1867: Sitting Bull

1870: Julia Ward Howe

1871: Paris Communards

1871: Paris Communards

1871: Victoria Woodhull

1875: Sioux Warriors

1876: Susan B. Anthony

1876: Wenya Boatman

1877: Joseph A. Dacus

1879: Heinmot Tooyalaket

1880: Robert Ingersoll

1882: Tarabai Shinde

1883: Jamal Ad-Din Al-Afghani

1884: Lucy Parsons

1880s: Nguyen Quang Bich

1885: Louis Riel

1886: Anna Julia Cooper

1887: José Rizal

1887: Louis Lingg

1887: Wong Chin Foo

1888: Anonymous

1890: Antonio Maceo

[…]

1911: Emiliano Zapata

1911: Emma Goldman

1911: Helen Keller

1911: William “Big Bill” Haywood

1912: Lawrence Strikers

1912: Mother Jones

1913: Black Women’s Protest

1914: Emmeline Pankhurst

1914: Ito Noe

1914: Mekatilili Wa Menza

1914: James Connolly

1914: Anonymous

1915: Rosa Luxemburg

1915: Alfred Bryan

1915: Clyde Workers’ Committee

1915: Joe Hill

1915: William Blake

1916: Easter Rising

1917: Randolph Bourne

1917: V. I. Lenin

1917: Mohammed Abdulla Hassan

1918: Sidney Webb

1918: Lu Xun

1918: Tristan Tzara

1918: Eugene Debs

1918: Garegin Pasdermajian

1918: John Maclean

1919: Rabindranath Tagore

1919: John Reed

1919: Eugen Leviné

1919: Chen Duxiu

1919: Claude Mckay

1919: Hubert R. Harrison

1920: Alexandra Kollontai

1920: Ho Chi Minh

1920: W. A. Domingo

1920: Li Dazhao

1920: Wadi Al-Bustani

1920: Al-Kinana

1920s: Vera Figner

1920s: Abdukhaliq “Uyghur”

1920: Revolutionary War Council of the Persian Red Army

1921: Kronstadt Rebels

1922: Kazi Nazrul Islam

1922: Sen Katayama

1924: Huda Shaarawi

1924: Vladimir Mayakovsky

1925: Nguyen An Ninh

[…]

2013: Chelsea Manning

2013: Edward Snowden

2014: Joshua Wong

2014: Ursula K. Le Guin

2015: Berta Cáceres

2015: Bree Newsome

2016: Colin Kaepernick

2016: Rezpect Our Water

2016: Chanel Miller

2017: Las Tesis

2017: Ni Una Menos

2017: Behrouz Boochani

2018: Yellow Vests Movements

2019: Alaa Salah

2019: Varun Grover

2019: Greta Thunberg