Best Subversive Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Like symbolism, decadence puts forth the idea that the function of literature is to evoke impressions and 'correspondences', rather than to realistically depict the world. ... the decadent aestheticized decay and took pleasure in perversity. In decadent literature, sickness is preferable to health, not only because sickness was regarded as more interesting, but because sickness was construed as subversive, as a threat to the very fabric of society. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy and the deviant, the decadents attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art.”

Art Sickness Bourgeois Symbolism Subversive Decadence Perversity Decadent Deviant Marginal Literature Decay

Author:Asti Hustvedt

“Here's what we're not taught [about the Declaration and Constitution]: Those words at the time they were written were blazingly, electrifyingly subversive. If you understand them truly now, they still are. You are not taught - and it is a disgrace that you aren't - that these men and women were radicals for liberty; that they had a vision of equality that was a slap in the face of what the rest of their world understood to be the unchanging, God-given order of nations; and that they were willing to die to make that desperate vision into a reality for people like us, whom they would never live to see.”

Liberty Democracy Independence Equality Usa Declaration Subversive

Book:The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

Source: The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

“To call any music subversive, to say that a set of pitches and rhythms could pose a threat to real power . . . ludicrous. And yet, from Plato to Pyongyang, that endless need to legislate sounds. To police the harmonic possibilities as if there were no limits to music’s threat.”

Music Subversive

Book:Orfeo

Source: Orfeo

“When the time has come to confront the hard truth, we may have to rewire our brains to ensure the healing from subversive mental barbs of aching incidents. ("Lost dreams")”

Healing Mental Subversive Brains Hard Truth Barbs Aching Lost Dreams Ensure Rewire

Author:Erik Pevernagie

“I had artistic classical training, and when you learn the classics for so many years, you might gain audacity, power and confidence to subvert everything. I am like the originals buffoons. I love the rules because I can break them.”

“At first reading, these are stories about love and marriage and the conventional heterosexual happily-ever-after. Only at the second does a sneaky doubt perhaps creep in to suggest that maybe marriage is not the best thing that could ever happen to these women. It has been suggested that with these clever layers of meaning, Jane was perhaps even more subversive than we give her credit for. Yes, she was writing for the commercial market. But she was also writing for her female cronies, for Martha Lloyd, Cassandra and Miss Sharp. She glibly provided the happy endings that society expected, but in an off-hand, almost perfunctory fashion. You don’t have to believe in Jane’s happy endings if you don’t want to. I like to think that this is the band of spinsters’ last laugh.”

Subversive Jane Austen Spinsters

Author:Lucy Worsley

“Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Shame comes in different doses.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Rare contact creates a stir. Gossip spreads. Tensions build. Denying Pissec, miserable Obelmäker and repressed Baumauer are all seething-jealous – openly or reservedly – within the hour. The pay rise promise is working a treat. Brichacek’s licking the tip of a pencil with her sticky pink tongue. “Stop flirting,” he tells her, but he looks at her breasts and thinks, The girls with the bruises in the sex films are just dead dolls, but this pretty toy is alive.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“It’s late and most of the clerks are at home in their beds, dreaming of swimming in pools filled with real money.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Don’t mock my suggestions, Ridley – one day in the near future, they might just save your life.” Maxwell D. Kalist.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Maxwell D. Kalist is a receiving teller at a city bank, Orwell and Finch, where he runs an efficient department of twenty two clerks and twelve junior clerks. He carries a leather-bound vade mecum everywhere with him – a handbook of the most widely contravened banking rules. He works humourlessly (on the surface of it) in a private, perfectly square office on the third floor of a restored grain exchange midway along the Eastern flank of Květniv’s busy, modern central plaza. Behind his oblong slate desk and black leather swivel chair is an intimidating, three-storey wall made almost entirely of bevelled, glare-reducing grey glass in art-deco style; one hundred and thirty six rectangles of gleam stacked together in a dangerously heavy collage.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Each day of the week, Kalist indulges himself in a different, secret ritual. On Mondays, he wears cologne. On Tuesdays, he eats meat for lunch. On Wednesdays, he places a bet after work. On Thursdays, he smokes one cigarette (but claims he’s not a smoker). On Fridays, he treats himself to his favourite pastime: horse practice – he grew up with horses and likes to try and emulate their distinctive whinnies, snorts, neighs, snuffles, sighs, grunts, fluttering nostrils, the occasional aggressive outburst and the especially beautiful nicker of a mare to her foal. And, on Saturdays, lest we forget, Maxwell D. Kalist drinks wine from a chalice.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“I’m warning you because you’re young and vulnerable. He’s a dirty, lying, conniving piece of shit and he’s dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.”

Source: From the Horse’s Mouth

“Social change is a million individual acts of kindness; culture change is a million subversive acts of resistance.”

Inspirational Culture Social Change Subversive Social Psychology Subversion Culture Change Subversive Ideas

Book:Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Source: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“My work generally tends to be an all-out, 360-degree subversive take on everything, most of all my own notion of myself as a son, father, husband, human being and male in this culture.”

Humans Culture Father My Own Human Beings Son Husband Degrees Males Notion Subversive Father Husband

Author:Mark Leyner

“This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?”

“I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.”

Cases Ideals Exciting Radical Pirate Subversive

Author:Will Oldham

“Sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities.”

Sex Creativity Activity Dictator Subversive

Author:Erica Jong

“There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics.”

Mathematics Radical Poetic Psychedelic Subversive Dreamy

Author:Paul Lockhart

“When I first read 'On the Road,' it helped me figure out how to live against the grain. Now I wonder how to be subversive when the subversive has become mainstream.”

Firsts Wonder Figures Mainstream Grain Subversive

Author:Tony D'Souza

“If [the legislature] will positively enact a thing to be done, the judges are not at liberty to reject it, for that were to set the judicial power above that of the legislature, which would be subversive of all government.”

Ifs Done Government Would Be Liberty Judging Rejection Rejects Positively Legislature Judicial Subversive Judicial Power

Author:William Blackstone

“A whole generation of veteran composers has never taken a stand or provided an example and has produced in the music academies generations of docile workers for the music industry. What can you expect from downtrodden workers who see music as a type of profession, like stenography, and not an act of creation that by its nature is subversive?”

Whole Taken Generations Example Creation Type Industry Workers Profession Composer Veteran Academy Music Industry Subversive Docile Downtrodden

Author:Itay Talgam

“Horror hostess, bondage goddess, Charles Addams cartoon comes to life, Vampire was every first-generation fanboy's wet dream. Scott Poole takes us on an unforgettable ride through the overlapping underworlds of B&D magazines, Hollywood noir, and early political liberation movements that inspired actress Maila Nurmi to challenge a postwar culture bent on stifling women's choices, bodies, and desires. This book is a subversive masterpiece.”

“There must be renewed recognition that societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police; this means there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.”

Way Mean Ideas War Play Progress Revolution Healthy Police Peaceful Recognition Reform Invites Stable Subversive Subversion Free Play Thought Police

Book:The Best of I.F. Stone

Source: The Best of I.F. Stone

“The Nazis hated culture itself, because it is essentially international and therefore subversive of nationalism. What they called Nazi culture was a local, perverted, nationalistic cult, by which a few major artists and many minor ones were honored for their Germanness, not their talent.”

Artist Culture Talent Majors International Locals Hated Nationalism Minors Nazi Cult Honored Subversive Nationalistic

Author:Christopher Isherwood

“Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction.”

Source: For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports

“Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.”

Ideas Reason Movement Limits Barriers Subversive

Book:One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

Source: One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“I got used to dealing with groups of boys and getting on with life in unpleasant circumstances and being smart and funny and subversive at the expense of authority.”

Used Boys Groups Circumstances Authority Smart Expenses Being Smart Subversive Smart And Funny

Author:Eric Idle

“Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those "easy speeches that comfort cruel men.”

Source: Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade without a Name

“The constitutionality and propriety of the Federal Government assuming to enter into a novel and vast field of legislation, namely, that of providing for the care and support of all those ... who by any form of calamity become fit objects of public philanthropy. ... I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity throughout the United States. To do so would, in my judgment, be contrary to the letter and spirit of the Constitution and subversive of the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.”

“Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.”

Knows World Doe Facts Wisdom Politics Community Economy Successful Theory Activity Normal Commitment Scientist Aim Fundamentals Assumption Liberalism Puzzles Novelty Subversive

Author:Thomas Kuhn

“It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.”

Thinking Men Moral Atheism Development Doctrine Positively Examination Subversive Clergy Thinking Man Moral Development

Author:George Eliot

“The idea that humans could be related to ape-like ancestors and the rest of creation was considered subversive. If man was just an animal, then he doesn't live forever, he has no soul. And if men don't have a soul, then there's no afterlife. No heaven, no fiery deterrent of hell to keep people in line in this life. And if there's no fiery deterrent to keep people in line, "well then we might as well have hell on Earth!" the critics said.”

“Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other - beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival - a knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.”

Two Body Mother Months Survival Daughter Female Nine Subversive Mother And Daughter Nine Months Subliminal

Book:Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution

Source: Of woman born motherhood as experience and institution

“It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.”

Ifs Littles Long Right Now Long Time Lions Yards Snakes Lawns Subversive Housework Mowing Mowing The Lawn

Author:Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Women Silence Subversive

Author:Jane Fonda

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

Ifs Whole Literature Fiction Elements Subversive

Author:Fay Weldon

“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.”

Ifs Truth Moral Truth Is Obligation Revolutionary Telling The Truth Subversive Moral Obligation

Author:Anne Lamott

“I'm interested in the female dom/male sub dynamic, and how superficially it can seem like a total reverse of gender roles and maybe even subversive or something.”

Seems Roles Female Males Gender Reverse Gender Roles Subversive Doms

Author:Marie Calloway

“tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice. It would be subversive of every human interest that the cry of one-half the human family be stifled. ... The world has had to limp along with the wobbling gait and one-sided hesitancy of a man with one eye. Suddenly the bandage is removed from the other eye and the whole body is filled with light. It sees a circle where before it saw a segment. The darkened eye restored, every member rejoices with it.”

“Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes.”

Way Ideas Literature Belief Fun Social Views Emotion Clear Figures Clothes Tales One Way Honored Great Work Emperor Pretense Approved Subversive Juvenile Children's Literature

Author:Alison Lurie

“in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination, and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power, and public success.”

World Art Real Matter Hands Literature Imagination Existence Real World What Matters Subversive Money Power Great Literature

Author:Alison Lurie

Subversive Quotes

Related topics

Subversive Quotes