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

  11 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  9 Copy quote

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

  Emile M. Cioran

  Prayer, Men, Civilized

  8 Copy quote

• 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.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

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

  Jane Fonda

  Women, Silence

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  Fay Weldon

  Fiction, Elements, Literature

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  58 Copy quote

  Show source

• Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth - more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid ... Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

  Bertrand Russell

  Courage, Men, Light

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Why Men Fight”, p.107, Routledge

  83 Copy quote

  Show source

• Gratitude is liberating. It is subversive. It helps us to realize that we are sufficient, and that realization frees us.

  Joanna Macy

  Gratitude, Realization, Helping

  Joanna Macy (2007). “World as Lover, World as Self: A Guide to Living Fully in Turbulent times”, p.72, Parallax Press

  90 Copy quote

  Show source

• Ive never been a popular person, but it doesnt matter. I have everything in my life that I want. Im not a walking publicity stunt. Im not an anarchist, or bitter. Im not trying to be subversive. I just try to remain unguarded, unprotected by fear, and agents and publicists, and I feel comfortable that way.

  Vincent Gallo

  Trying, Agents, Want

  7 Copy quote

• Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.

  Roland Barthes

  Photography, Thinking, Pensive

  12 Copy quote

• In a society that considers all genuine ideas subversive, which seeks to discourage ideological imagination, and which aims to abolish thought in favour of spectacle, the main goal must be to awaken people’s consciences, raising traumatising problems and sending ideological electroshocks: shocking ideas.

  Guillaume Faye

  Ideas, People, Imagination

  Guillaume Faye, Michael O'Meara (2010). “Archeofuturism”, p.15, Arktos

  13 Copy quote

  Show source

• Every rebellion against suffering is fed by the subversive power of remembered suffering.

  Johann Baptist Metz

  Pain, Suffering, Remember

  58 Copy quote

• It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second most valuable property on loan to him during his working years.

  J. D. Salinger

  Years, Feelings, Obscurity

  "JD Salinger: from boy of war, to modern man of letters" by Robert McCrum, www.theguardian.com. January 30, 2010.

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Prayer, Pyramids, Hatred

  229 Copy quote

• The novel as a form is usually seen to be moral if its readers consider freedom, individuality, democracy, privacy, social connection, tolerance and hope to be morally good, but it is not considered moral if the highest values of a society are adherence to rules and traditional mores, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships, and absolute ideas of right and wrong. Any society based on the latter will find novels inherently immoral and subversive.

  Jane Smiley

  Ideas, Tolerance, Individuality

  Jane Smiley (2014). “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel”, p.129, Faber & Faber

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises.

  T Bone Burnett

  Honesty, Disguise

  Song: Hollywood Mecca of the Movies, Album: The True False Identity

  5 Copy quote

  Show source

• Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony

  Judith Butler

  Hegemony, Way, Kind

  Judith Butler (2011). “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity”, p.189, Routledge

  53 Copy quote

  Show source

• Well. Then we had the irises, rising beautiful and cool on their tall stalks, like blown glass, like pastel water momentarily frozen in a splash, light blue, light mauve, and the darker ones, velvet and purple, black cat's ears in the sun, indigo shadow, and the bleeding hearts, so female in shape it was a surprise they'd not long since been rooted out. There is something subversive about this garden of Serena's, a sense of buried things bursting upwards, wordlessly, into the light, as if to point, to say: Whatever is silenced will clamor to be heard, though silently.

  Margaret Atwood

  Beautiful, Cat, Heart

  Margaret Atwood (1986). “The Handmaid's Tale”, p.153, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  35 Copy quote

  Show source

• It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

  Anthony Trollope

  Honesty, Men, Political

  32 Copy quote

• Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense.

  Pauline Kael

  Stupid, Believe, Dirty

  Pauline Kael (1994). “For keeps”, E P Dutton

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

  Carol P. Christ

  Powerful, Language

  4 Copy quote