Subversive Quotes - Page 3

• 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

• 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

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• [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

  5 Copy quote

• ...art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Freedom, Fire

  50 Copy quote

• If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.

  Anne Lamott

  Real, Writing, Emotional

  8 Copy quote

• Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

  Terry Eagleton

  Art, Ideas, Looks

  7 Copy quote

• 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

• My art teacher in junior high was a very out gay man and a mentor to me. He would tell us about Greenwich Village and show us the 'Village Voice' and describe his life, but it was all sort of subversive and below the radar.

  Gus Van Sant

  Teacher, Art, Gay

  Interview with Tony Dushane, www.motherjones.com. December 5, 2008.

  56 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  53 Copy quote

• Egotism is usually subversive of sagacity.

  Marianne Moore

  Ego, Egotism, Sagacity

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

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

• 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

• 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

• The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. ... They were elements of disorder and subversion. On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind. This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.

  Benito Mussolini

  Gun, Numbers, Government

  16 Copy quote

• ...I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals... I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose.

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Gun, Self, Law

  8 Copy quote

• All art is subversive.

  Pablo Picasso

  Art, Art Is

  7 Copy quote

• I wish to propose for the reader's favourable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

  Bertrand Russell

  Believe, Thinking, Supposing That

  Sceptical Essays (1928) "On the Value of Scepticism"

  43 Copy quote

  Show source

• This movement among the Jews is not new... This world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing... It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.

  Winston Churchill

  Real, World Government, Civilization

  "Bolshevism versus Zionism; a struggle for the soul of the Jewish people". Winston Churchill, Illustrated Daily Herald, February 8, 1920.

  22 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote