Subversive Quotes

“The most subversive people are those who ask questions.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“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")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“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. ”
― Naomi Wolf, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

“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

“Two people whose opinion I respect told me that the word "Christian" would turn people off. This certainly says something about the state of Christianity today. I wouldn't mind if to be a Christian were accepted as being the dangerous thing which it is; I wouldn't mind if, when a group of Christians meet for bread and wine, we might well be interrupted and jailed for subversive activities; I wouldn't mind if, once again, we were being thrown to the lions. I do mind, desperately, that the word "Christian" means for so many people smugness, and piosity, and holier-than-thouness. Who today can recognize a Christian because of "how those Christians love one another?”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

“Socrates himself said, 'One thing only I know, and this is that I know nothing.'
Remember this statement, because it is an admission that is rare, even among philosophers. Moreover, it can be so dangerous to say in public that it can cost you your life. The most subversive people are those who ask questions. Giving answers is not nearly as threatening. Any one question can be more explosive than a thousand answers.”
― Jostein Gaarder, Sophie’s World

“It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.”
― Stephen Fry, The Liar

“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.”
― Asti Hustvedt

“Without pride, man becomes a parasite – and there are already too many parasites.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“That the power regimes of heterosexism and phallogocentrism seek to augment themselves through a constant repetition of their logic, their metaphysic, and their naturalized ontologies does not imply that repetition itself ought to be stopped—as if it could be. If repetition is bound to persist as the mechanism of the cultural reproduction of identities, then the crucial question emerges: What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?”
― Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Shame comes in different doses.”
― Carla H Krueger, 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.”
― Carla H Krueger, 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.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“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.”
― Nuno Roque

“Don’t mock my suggestions, Ridley – one day in the near future, they might just save your life.” Maxwell D. Kalist.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“Social change is a million individual acts of kindness; culture change is a million subversive acts of resistance.”
― Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

“To Kalist, Baumauer’s just a timber bridge in need of a good hot fire.”
― Carla H Krueger, 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?”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“Every time I so much as blink you get an erection.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“She had never been taught to ask permission to do things, and she knew nothing at all about authority, so she would not have thought it necessary to ask Mrs. Medlock if she might walk about the house, even if she had seen her.”
― Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

“You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“He’s in a side room alone with her and it’s far too fucking hot.”
― Carla H Krueger, 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.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“Secrets are dangerous.” Gottfried Baumauer.”
― Carla H Krueger, From the Horse’s Mouth

“Even if Aristotle was not an atheist in the sense that he directly and openly attacked the divine . . . one could say that he was one in a broader sense, because his ideas on divinity indirectly tend to undermine it and destroy it.”
― Denis Diderot

“But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the Universe would go up in flames.”
― Luis Buñuel

“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.”
― Lucy Worsley

“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

“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.”
― Richard Powers, Orfeo