Going Against Mainstream Quotes & Sayings

It is amazing what a lot of insect life goes on under your nose when you have got it an inch from the earth. I suppose it goes on in any case, but if you are proceeding on your stomach, dragging your body along by your fingernails, entomology presents itself very forcibly as a thoroughly justified science. — Beryl Markham

You'd have to put yourself back in the 1960s to understand how separate from the mainstream of American life soldiers felt themselves to be, because we knew that students and others were demonstrating pretty violently against what we were doing. — Joe Haldeman

The one thing that reconciles me to the fact of being a woman is the reflection that it delivers me from the necessity of being married to one. — Mary Wortley Montagu

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. — Tony D'Souza

I'm interested in continuing our conversation about the discomfiture I picked up in the mainstream media with one particular element of this debate. It was this discomfort with a law against adultery. — Mike Pence

There was a time I had resentment against everything mainstream. — Anurag Kashyap

When I have learnt to love God better than my earthly dearest, I shall love my earthly dearest better than I do now. — Timothy S. Lane

While a lot of people want to join the left to react against the mainstream or right, I in many ways react against the left - not a lot of its fundamental commitments, but its often dismal tone, righteousness, defeatism, etc. — Rebecca Solnit

If I don't defend for myself, who will? — Wesley T. Calaway

Netanyahu and his coalition have no strategy of their own except endless counterinsurgency against the backdrop of a steadily deteriorating diplomatic positionThe operation in Gaza is not Netanyahu's strategy in excess; it is Netanyahu's strategy in its entirety. The liberal Zionist, two-state vision(that) once commanded a mainstream position within Israeli political life has been relegated to a left-wing rump within it. — Jonathan Chait

I find when I'm touring or when I'm traveling, I just enter this other world kind of. It's much easier for me to be creative and be unselfconscious about creating when I'm home. — Julia Kent

Makery-ness in the U.S. comes as part of a complex of oppositional attitudes toward mainstream culture that is more about social signaling than unvarnished commitment to DIY. The Maker Movement involves ostentatiously DIY products, designed and assembled against a background of nostalgia for the old U.S. manufacturing industry, often produced in small batches for connoisseurs of the handmade, created as a form of conspicuous production. Meanwhile, — Clay Shirky

I think that you take the path of least resistance. And for a lot of people comedy is that path. I mean, even against mainstream, it's easier to sell a comedy than a drama. — Kevin Grevioux

When bands come from that underground scene and go into the mainstream, people just hate it. And it blows my mind. If you're saying you don't like what pop culture is, then change it. And when someone does make an effort to change it, everyone rebels against it and hates it. You can't win. People just want that division to exist. They don't want that division to go away. — Laura Jane Grace

Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within. — Reza Aslan

Trout might have said, and it can be said of me as well, that he created caricatures rather than characters. His animus against so-called mainstream literature, moreover, wasn't peculiar to him. It was generic among writers of science fiction. — Kurt Vonnegut

Storytelling and copulation are the two chief forms of amusement in the South. They're inexpensive and easy to procure. — Robert Penn Warren

I'm willing to be different than other parents and go against the mainstream. — Amy Chua

When I was in high school at Northeast Catholic in Philadelphia in the late '30s, I found that drawing caricatures of the teachers and satirizing the events in the school, then having them published in our school magazine, got me some notoriety. — Bil Keane

Radical views that are outside the mainstream generally (but not always) are more reliable than the dominant view because they are more regularly challenged and tested against evidence. They do not get to float freely down the mainstream; they must swim against the current. They cannot rest on the orthodox power to foreclose dissent, and they are not supported by the unanimity of bias that passes for objectivity. — Michael Pare

I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the"mainstream" culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn't think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it. — Jan Clausen

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons. — Jonathan Michel Metzl

'Well,' said Red Jacket [to someone complaining that he had not enough time], 'I suppose you have all there is.' — Ralph Waldo Emerson

What my mom failed to understand was that I didn't even want long hair
I needed long hair. And my desire for protracted, flowing locks had virtually nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a form of protest against the constructions of mainstream society. My motivation was far more philosophical. I wanted to rock. — Chuck Klosterman

I have yet to find the man, however exalted his station, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than under a spirit of criticism. — Charles Schwab

Sometimes, political campaigns make decent people act and talk like perfect buffoons. — Tony Snow

I chiefly concern myself with those who seldom get a hearing, & I don't feel it is incumbent on me to balance their voices with the well-crafted apologetics of the powerful. The powerful are generally excellently served by the mainstream media or propaganda organs. The powerful should be quoted, yes, but to measure their pronouncements against the truth, not to obscure it. — Joe Sacco

Don't rebel against the mainstream only to conform to the underground. — Tomas Kalnoky

My side ain't chosen. My side was given. — John Marston

The scientists who attack mainstream religion, rather than striving for peaceful coexistence with it, damage science, and also weaken the fight against fundamentalism. — Martin Rees

We will build in Britain a cyber strike capability so we can strike back in cyber space against enemies who attack us, putting cyber alongside land, sea, air and space as a mainstream military activity. — Philip Hammond