Subversion Quotes

“Graffiti is beautiful; like a brick in the face of a cop.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“I don't remember when exactly I read my first comic book, but I do remember exactly how liberated and subversive I felt as a result.”
― Edward Said, Palestine

“Years ago I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on the earth. I said then and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
― Eugene V. Debs, Debs: His Life, Writings and Speeches

“The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.”
― Edward Abbey

“The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.”
― Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book

“The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.”
― Zeena Schreck

“One of the great ironies of how democracies die is that the very defense of democracy is often used as a pretext for its subversion. Would-be autocrats often use economic crises, natural disasters, and especially security threats—wars, armed insurgencies, or terrorist attacks—to justify antidemocratic measures.”
― Steven Levitsky, How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future

“Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.”
― Zeena Schreck

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.”
― Tomas Schuman

“I think that when in doubt about the truth of an issue, it's safer and in better taste to select the least numerous of the adversaries.”
― Ayn Rand, We the Living

“Exposure to true information does not matter anymore.

A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information.
The facts tell nothing to him.

Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures.
Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union, and show him a concentration camp,
he will refuse to believe it, until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom.

When the military boot crushes his balls, then he will understand, but not before that.
That is the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.”
― Yuri Bezmenov

“Je précise que je crois profondément à bien peu de choses, deux ou trois. La justice sociale, l’éducation, la subversion [...]. Je crois profondément que l’avenir de l’Homme et de sa fiancée ne se joue pas à la Bourse, à l’Université, dans un Parlement, dans un journal, dans un laboratoire de recherche. Je crois profondément que l’avenir de l’humanité se joue, chaque jour, dans la classe d’un prof de philo qui donne un cours sur le libre-arbitre à de futurs plombiers, de futurs flics, coiffeuses, infirmiers, informaticiennes et vendeurs de chars usagés. » (Pierre Foglia, éditorial, La Presse, 16 mai 1996)”
― Pierre Foglia

“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

“Every discovery in pure science is potentially subversive.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

“The tendency of democratic authorities is to acquiesce in any broadcasting which does not offend against decency and which is not subversive of the state. The point is rapidly being approached at which the precise interpretation of these principles will become exceedingly interesting.”
― Hilda Matheson, Broadcasting

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

“Since 1945 there has been no Third World War. The development of nuclear weapons may prevent such a catastrophe. In the two World Wars words were one of a variety of weapons in the armory of the belligerent powers. In future, because of the advent of nuclear weapons, words may be the only arms which the super-powers can employ without risking annihilation.”
― Charles Roetter, The Art of Psychological Warfare, 1914-1945

“Stay on the path and you'll be safe, eat in peace, sleep in peace, breathe in peace; stray and beware. Work together and we can subvert their evil order. It was a map of the black nation inside the white world, part of the bigger thing but its own self, independent, with its own constitution. If we didn't help one another we'd be lost out there.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“It was the most subversive rebellion he'd allowed himself in all his years of obedience, the choice to make connections with people who should have been beneath his notice.”
― Kit Rocha, Beyond Jealousy

“One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. "I thank God," he said, that "there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!”
― Jonathan Kozol, Illiterate America

“In closing, the reader may profit by a quote from Yuri Bezmenov on the nature of Russian subversion. According to Bezmenov, the highest art of warfare is to subvert anything of value in the country of your enemy, until such time that the perception of your enemy is screwed up to such an extent that he does not perceive you as an enemy….
J.R.Nyquist”
― J.R.Nyquist

“The left has long recognized a deep sociological truth about capitalism: namely, that the market has no effective organ of defense against infiltration and subversion.”
― J.R.Nyquist

“Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.”
― Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography

“She was back. Even so, Will didn't move. He would wait her out, fake-relaxing in the uncomfortable chair with his head not against the wall, tapping his hands to Bureaucratic Barbara's brainwashing beat as an act of solidarity with every other man she'd tried to enervate with her bell and refusal to offer change.

[inner dialog of Will Phillips]”
― Will Willingham, Adjustments

“En général, la parole ne se donne pas ; elle se prend.”
― Valérie Lefebvre-Faucher, Procès verbal

“We need to be careful wherever art and literature, disguised in beauty, entertainment, or codes are used for subversion, rather than liberating, uplifting innocent souls.”
― Cem Tanriover, MANY MANY BEGINNINGS: SPIRITUALITY, INSPIRATION AND PEACE IN TIMES OF COLORFUL MURDERS

“That's the pattern of most subversive organization," Peter explained. "They use feelings of patriotism and loyalty to a chosen faith to stir up feelings of hate and so set one group against another.”
― Margaret Sutton, Search for the Glowing Hand

“The loving vision does not become entangled in the agenda of power, seduction, opposition, or complicity. Such loving is creative and subversive. It rises above the pathetic arithmetic of blame and judgement and engages experience at the level of origin, structure, and destiny.”
― John O'Donohue, Anam Cara [Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition]: A Book of Celtic Wisdom

“The artist, the true artist, will always be an enemy of the State.”
― Edmundo Desnoes, Memories of Underdevelopment