Subversive Quotes - Page 2

• If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.

  Erica Jong

  Sex, Creativity, Voice

  FaceBook post by Erica Jong from Oct 28, 2015

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• It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.

  Edward Abbey

  Tasks, Answers, Insolent

  Edward Abbey (2015). “A Voice Crying in the Wilderness”, p.36, RosettaBooks

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• I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Prayer, Men, Civilized

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• From the days of Spartacus, Weishophf, Karl Marx, Trotski, Belacoon, Rosa Luxenburg, and Ema Goldman, this world conspiracy has been steadily growing. This conspiracy played a definite recognizable role in the tragedy of the French revolution. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th Century. And now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their head and have become the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.

  Winston Churchill

  America, Hair, Order

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• I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the world actually worked and if you could show how the world actually worked it would always have a de-masking and a subversive effect on the powerful. I don't think that's quite true, but it seems to me it's not bad as a point of departure anyway.

  James C. Scott

  Powerful, Thinking, Departure

  "An Interview with James C. Scott | Harry G. West and Celia Plender". Gastronomica Interview, gastronomica.org. March 14, 2017.

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• There's this sense of being strange, which is at the heart of every creative person. Every writer, every actor, every director knows who Ripley is. We've made careers and lives out of pretending, making things up, inhabiting other people's stories and lives. That's what I do every day. . . . The story is so audacious and subversive: a central character who behaves badly and isn't apparently caught. That intrigued me no end.

  Anthony Minghella

  Character, Heart, Careers

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• So much conspires to silence us - because our truths are inherently subversive.

  Jane Fonda

  Women, Silence

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• Entertain, yes. That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that all writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the status quo.

  Harlan Ellison

  Writing, Way, Doe

  Harlan Ellison (2016). “Slippage”, p.128, Hachette UK

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• To exist is to defy all that threatens you. To be a rebel is not to accumulate a library of subversive books or to dream of fantastic conspiracies or of taking to the hills. It is to make yourself your own law. To find in yourself what counts. To make sure that you’re never “cured” of your youth. To prefer to put everyone up against the wall rather than to remain supine. To pillage whatever can be converted to your law, without concern for appearance.

  Dominique Venner

  Inspirational, Life, Dream

  "The Rebel: An Interview with Dominique Venner". www.counter-currents.com. June 29, 2010.

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• Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.

  Fay Weldon

  Fiction, Elements, Literature

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• The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods.

  John Calvin

  Lying, Religion, May

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• Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

  Marianne Moore

  Ego, Egotism, Sagacity

  Francis Fisher Browne, Scofield Thayer, Waldo Ralph Browne, Marianne Moore (1927). “The Dial”

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• On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

  Walter Brueggemann

  Commitment, Hands, Limits

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• I think an erotics of place may be one of the reasons why environmentalists are seen as subversive. There is a backlash now:... [ellipsis in source] take all the regulations away; weaken existing legislation; the endangered species act is too severe, too restrictive; let there be carte blanche for real-estate developers. Because if we really have to confront wildness, solitude, and serenity, both the fierceness and compassionate nature of the land, then we ultimately have to confront it in ourselves, and it's easier to be numb, to be distracted, to be disengaged.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Nature, Real, Thinking

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• We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

  Cornel West

  Kindness, Radical, Sweetness

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• I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture. It's one thing to mess stuff up and break stuff, but [Borat] is really pointing out the ideology of America. It's one thing to break stuff and damage people's possessions, but when you start aiming at the ideology of America, that's dangerous comedy.

  Adam McKay

  Silly, Dumb, Doubt

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• I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.

  Andy Goldsworthy

  Artist, Way, Quiet

  Andy Goldsworthy (2001). “Midsummer Snowballs”, Harry N. Abrams

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• I have to say that Adam Levine is truly a daring young man to go on Twitter to bash Fox News. He's so rebellious, so subversive. I mean, for a musician, seriously, could you find a more predictable stance than that? He's as edgy as a hacky sack, which also describes his music.

  Greg Gutfeld

  Mean, Men, Fox News

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• The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands.

  John L. Lewis

  Philosophy, Real, Government

  Labor and the Nation, delivered 3 September 1937 in Washington D.C.

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• I see no good reason why the views given this volume [The Origin of Species] should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibnitz, 'as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion.'

  Charles Darwin

  Religious, Science, Men

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• Serving the reader by working cooperatively with the writer? Sometimes throwing 'the rules' out the window? Clearing the decks of pet peeves, mythical prohibitions and intractability? That is subversive. And welcome.

  Craig Lancaster

  Pet, Welcome, Sometimes

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• The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive.

  Michael Azerrad

  Thinking, People, Made

  Source: www.avclub.com

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• Regarding pushing the form, ideas interest me more than form. I think you can write a very subversive play in a three-act structure. The content makes the play. I feel the form is simply dressing, because ultimately, you want to communicate to the audience, and sometimes the best way to do that is to present a provocative idea in a format that is comfortable for them to receive. Then the idea will come through directly, right in solar plexus. After all, I want to make a living as an artist, and that means speaking to the audience in a form they can understand.

  Caridad Svich

  Mean, Writing, Thinking

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• Imagination consists in expelling from reality several incomplete persons, and then using the magic and subversive powers of desire to bring them back in the form of one entirely satisfying presence.

  Rene Char

  Reality, Imagination, Magic

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• [Using humor to explore serious issues] disarms people. It's a way in. It's gentle, but at the same time it's subversive, and I like that duality.

  Lisa Loomer

  Issues, People, Crafts

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