Quotes & Sayings About Subversive

Sir Hugh Greene is the man I hold most responsible for the state of our country today. For 11 years hardly a week went by without a sniping reference to me. And he gave access to anyone who was prepared to say anything morally subversive. — Mary Whitehouse

I want to do the most subversive thing I couldn't do as a child: I want to take back the planet's future. — Louie Psihoyos

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

Human kindness is deeply subversive to totalitarian creeds, which seek to thwart all compassion toward those deemed unworthy of moral consideration, those branded as internal or external enemies. — Chris Hedges

There are many fans of hard rock music that have been wrongly pigeonholed as apathetic. This music is not music for the elitist coffeehouse culture in SoHo. It' s rock 'n' roll music for kids across the land, and I think that makes it much more subversive in a way, in that it has the form and the function of a powerful, populist music, but it can carry very incendiary messages. — Tom Morello

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. — John Le Carre

All art is fundamentally subversive, because it upsets people's perceptions, their notions about society. Therefore, art is dangerous, but good art is always making us reassess our thoughts and feelings about how we relate to other people. There are always people who fear that and want to suppress that. — John Boorman

Rest and laughter are the most spiritual and subversive acts of all. Laugh, rest, slow down. — Anne Lamott

If we continue to think of ourselves mostly as consumers, it's going to be very hard to bring our environmental troubles under control. But it's also going to be very hard to live the rounded and joyful lives that could be ours. This is a subversive volume in all the best ways! — Bill McKibben

I have these secret pangs of shame about being single, like I wasn't good enough to get a husband. Rita reminded me of something I'd told her once, about the five rules of the world as arrived at by this Catholic priest named Tom Weston. The first rule, he says, is that you must not have anything wrong with you or anything different. The second one is that if you do have something wrong with you, you must get over it as soon as possible. The third rule is that if you can't get over it, you must pretend that you have. The fourth rule is that if you can't even pretend that you have, you shouldn't show up. You should stay home, because it's hard for everyone else to have you around. And the fifth rule is that if you are going to insist on showing up, you should at least have the decency to feel ashamed.
So Rita and I decided that the most subversive, revolutionary thing I could do was to show up for my life and not be ashamed. — Anne Lamott

It would be hard to point out any error more truly subversive of all the order and beauty, all the peace and happiness, of human society than the position that the body of men have a right to make what laws they please; or that laws can derive any authority from their institution merely and independent of the quality of the subject-matter. No arguments of policy, reason of state, or preservation of the constitution can be pleaded in favor of such a practice. They may in deed impeach the frame of that constitution; but can never touch this immovable principle. This seems to be, indeed, the principle which Hobbes broached in the last century, and which was then so frequently and so ably refuted. — Edmund Burke

Fiction should be in its way subversive. I don't think books should be neat or gentle or genteel or comforting. I think they should be raw. They should be written as perfectly as possible, but what they do is to stir up, to lance the reader. — Edna O'Brien

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? — Itay Talgam

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

The most subversive people are those who ask questions. — Jostein Gaarder

The extremists had declared jihad against anyone and anything that challenged their vision of a pure Islamic society, and these artifacts - treatises about logic, astrology, and medicine, paeans to music, poems idealizing romantic love - represented five hundred years of human joy. They celebrated the sensual and the secular, and they bore the explicit message that humanity, as well as God, was capable of creating beauty. They were monumentally subversive. — Joshua Hammer

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once. — James Gleick

Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. — Herbert Marcuse

There is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mind blowing as cosmology or physics (mathematicians conceived of black holes long before astronomers actually found any), and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music (which depends heavily on properties of the physical universe). Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood. — Paul Lockhart

As Christians, we should be the best collaborators in the world. We should be quick to find unlikely allies and subversive friends, like Jesus did. — Shane Claiborne

Can I find a poetic that can be subversive enough to grab people in some subliminal way, to where they feel that they are altered and have had an experience that belonged to them? — Julian Schnabel

Wonder Showzen is one of my favorite shows of all time. When I first saw it, I thought it was so funny and new and original and edgy and insane and subversive. I didn't know comedy could do that. — Eric Andre

If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That's what they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don't try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn't do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game. — Noam Chomsky

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive. — Lionel Trilling

The most socially subversive institution of our time is the one-parent family. — Paul Johnson

Prophetic preaching is dangerous work, not only because it has a subversive edge but because it requires an epistemological break with the assumed world of dominant imagination. This epistemological break makes us aware of our assumptions we have not recognized or reflected upon. — Walter Brueggemann

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. — Mark Leyner

Together, on his back porch, his cigarette smoke rising like incense to the heavens, we spoke to the God of grace we both are so grateful to know up close and personal. It may be the most beautiful prayer I've ever heard. Jesus, for some reason you've given us another day, and you've set us in Narnia. There are people who still think it's frozen, and there are people who are longing to be thawed but don't know it. God, I pray that what you've called us to do would be the subversive work of the kingdom, that we would help participate in the melting of Narnia, and that people would come alive and would drink and dance and sing and just celebrate life in ways that are so marvelous that the world would press its face against the glass and see the redeemed celebrate life. Amen. — Cathleen Falsani

Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, Thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought is great and swift and free. — Bertrand Russell

The attitude toward women in this industry is nauseating. There are all sorts of porcine executives who are uncomfortable with a woman doing anything subversive. They want the movie about the beautiful girl who trips and falls, the adorable klutz. — Diablo Cody

At one edge of the base, pressed between the fenceline and the sea, shimmered the pale archways and columns, the madrone and wind-shaped cypresses of the clifftop campus of College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes. — Thomas Pynchon

Hours trickle by, and I wilt. The magic isn't here for me tonight. I can't get away from the heavy feeling of being me. I want to blend in, to be someone besides myself, someone who is part of something secret and subversive and exciting. — Bethany Griffin

The vanity of shining in conversation is usually subversive of its own desires. — Lydia Sigourney

The American indie underground made music for like-minded people who thought for themselves. Thinking for yourself is intrinsically subversive. — Michael Azerrad

Which is more subversive-and corrosive-to believe in altruism or to see it simply as a cloak of self interest? Even if altruism did not exist, it would be necessary to believe in it. Pessimists in power are prone to despotism. — Frank Prochaska

Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks. — Roland Barthes

I always believed that social science was a progressive profession because it was the powerful who had the most to hide about how the world actually worked and if you could show how the world actually worked it would always have a de-masking and a subversive effect on the powerful. I don't think that's quite true, but it seems to me it's not bad as a point of departure anyway. — James C. Scott

It is in your interest', said the dancer Pylades to Augustus, 'that the people should devote their spare time to us entertainers - if they do so, they will not bother about subversive politics. — Michael Grant

Tell me you don't want to do those women on Fox News," Jimena says. "Tell me you don't," Giorgio counters. "Anyway, of course I do. I want to convert them through the subversive power of the orgasm." "So it would be a political act," Jimena says. "I am willing to sacrifice myself for the cause," Giorgio answers. — Don Winslow

Charles checked on his two snitches among the subversives. There were bascially two subversive groups in Blue Eye -Communists and Republicans, - and Charles confirmed quickly that neither had any revolutions planned — Stephen Hunter

In Plato's republic, poets were considered subversive, a danger to the republic. I kind of relish that role. So I see my present role as a gadfly, to use my soapbox to promote my various ideas and obsesions. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

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. — William Blackstone

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. — Carl Sagan

Get the
Jews out of banking and they cannot control the economic life
of the community. Get the Jews out of education and they cannot
pervert the minds of the young to their subversive doctrines.
Get the Jews out of government and they cannot betray the
nation. — Eustace Mullins

To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how
many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How
many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or
mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in
the hard work of genuine initiation. — Zeena Schreck

Even the mild-mannered Sophia Western of Tom Jones and Richardson's annoyingly pious Clarissa Harlow distinguished themselves by saying no to the authority of their parents, their societies, and norms and demanding to marry the man they chose. Perhaps it was exactly because women were deprived of so much in their real lives that they became so subversive in the realm of fiction, refusing the authority imposed on them, breaking out of old structures, not submitting. — Azar Nafisi

But money itself is a commodity, an external object, capable of becoming the private property of any individual. Thus social power becomes the private power of private persons. The ancients therefore denounced money as subversive of the economic and moral order of things.[106] Modern society, which, soon after its birth, pulled Plutus by the hair of his head from the bowels of the earth,[107] greets gold as its Holy Grail, as the glittering incarnation of the very principle of its own life. — Karl Marx

The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings. — Alison Bechdel

The idea that there is a God who rewards and punishes, and who can reward, if he so wishes, the meanest and vilest of the human race, so that he will be eternally happy, and can punish the best of the human race, so that he will be eternally miserable, is subversive of all morality. — Robert Green Ingersoll

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

Songs are dangerous, songs are subversive and can change your life. — Ronnie Gilbert

Comics can definitely be subversive on the whole, but it's a stylistic thing. — Ted Alexandro

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

Imagination consists in expelling from reality many incomplete persons, making use of the magical and subversive powers of desire, to obtain their return in the form of a completely satisfying presence. This, then, is the inextinguishable, uncreated reality. — Rene Char

Creativity is basically subversive ... — Dan Wieden

The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. — Louise Erdrich

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

Art is maybe a subversive activity. There is a certain rebellion when you are an artist at heart, even if only in the art of living. — Philippe Petit

There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't. — Carla H. Krueger

Bez blew out a breath and leaned heavily against the bar. Honestly, D, you're better off busting your subversive cherry with something else. A nice werewolf killing. A vampire blood drive. — Laura Oliva

In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. — Bill Watterson

In 1951, Air Scoop published a long list of organizations that the government had labeled totalitarian, Communist, or subversive, the clear message that affiliation with any of them might jeopardize one's job. — Margot Lee Shetterly

His sensitive nature was still smarting under the lashes of an undivided and squalid way of life. His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into his crude writings. — James Joyce

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive. — Robert Fisk

Facts are subversive — I. F. Stone

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

Unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. — Alasdair MacIntyre

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. — Marie Calloway

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

Theologian and scholar Walter Brueggemann writes beautifully in 'The Prophetic Imagination' that real hope comes only after despair. Only if we have tasted despair, only if we have known the deep sadness of unfulfilled dreams and promises, only if we can dare to look reality in the face and name it for what it is, can we dare to begin to imagine a better way.
Hope is subversive precisely because it dares to admit that all is not as it should be.
And so we are holding out for, working for, creating, prophesying, and living into something better
for the kingdom to come, for oaks of righteousness to tower, for leaves to blossom for the healing of the nations, for swords to be beaten into plowshares, for joy to come in the morning, and for redemption and justice. — Sarah Bessey

Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe. — John O'Donohue

I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street. — Rene Magritte

Our society accepts the book as a given, but the act of reading
once considered useful and important, as well as potentially dangerous and subversive
is now condescendingly accepted as a pastime, a slow pastime that lacks efficiency and does not contribute to the common good. — Alberto Manguel

Dr. Jubal Harshaw, professional clown, amateur subversive, and parasite by choice, had long attempted to eliminate "hurry" and all related emotions from his pattern. Being aware that he had but a short time left to live and having neither Martian nor Kansan faith in his own immortality, it was his purpose to live each golden moment as if it were eternity - without fear, without hope, but with sybaritic gusto. — Robert A. Heinlein

I've never been a popular person, but it doesn't matter. I have everything in my life that I want. I'm not a walking publicity stunt. I'm not an anarchist, or bitter. I'm 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

The Fanaticism which discards the Scripture, under the pretense of resorting to immediate revelations is subversive of every principle of Christianity. For when they boast extravagantly of the Spirit, the tendency is always to bury the Word of God so they may make room for their own falsehoods. — John Calvin

What's most insidious about MTV is that it commodifies precisely those things that young people believe are subversive. In other words, subversity itself has become a commodity. It's all a way to trick young people into believing that there's something unique about what they do, but this is all completely a corporately designed maneuver. — Todd Solondz

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. — Leonard Cohen

Smallness is subversive, because smallness can creep into smaller places and wreak transformation at the most vulnerable, cellular level. In a time when largeness is threatening to topple us, I wish to remember and praise the beauty of smallness, in order to banish the Goliath of loneliness. — Sarah Ruhl

Hairspray is the only movie I made that's subversive, because they're doing it in every high school in America. A man's playing a woman, and two men sing a love song to each other. — John Waters

Comedy is inherently subversive because it turns the normal reality on its head. The art form is all about these questions and contradictions. In comedy, we're dealing with language that we all understand, but words can have a dozen other things around them that alter or affect meaning. — Paul Provenza

It was a subversive notion, the idea that she was free. Free to choose where to go and what to do with her time. — G.S. Jennsen

Christianity always flourishes most as a life-giving minority, not as a powerful majority. It is through subversive, countercultural acts of love, justice, and service for the common good that Christianity has always gained the most ground. — Scott Sauls

I loved practical jokes. I loved being goofy on the playground, and I loved doing silly cartoons, but I was not this subversive little delinquent. I am an Eagle Scout, after all. — Steve Breen

The man who knows that nothing in demand is out of production soon expects that nothing produced can be out of demand. Not to go where one can go would be subversive. It would unmask as folly the assumption that every satisfied demand entails the discovery of an even greater unsatisfied one. Not to produce what is possible would expose the law of "rising expectations" as a euphemism for a growing frustration gap, which is the motor of a society built on the co-production of services and increased demand. — Ivan Illich

I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering. — Oscar Arias

Anything written for an audience of mostly women by a community of mostly women is subversive, reflective of the current sexual, emotional, and political status, and actively embraces and undermines that status simultaneously. — Sarah Wendell

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. — Christopher Hitchens

Finally, Christians were accused of being subversive, for they refused to worship the emperor and thus destroyed the very fiber of society. The apologists answered that it was true that they refused to worship the emperor or any other creature, but that in spite of this they were loyal subjects of the empire. What the emperor needs - they said - is not to be worshiped, but to be served; and those who serve him best are those who pray for him and for the empire to the only true God. — Justo L. Gonzalez

The system loves resistance. Resistance is often creative and it feeds on creativity until the subversive becomes just another pre-packaged lifestyle on special offer. So Cease to Resist. Relax and enjoy the PandaemonAeon. Believe everything and anything. Seek not proof, but take pleasure in your choice of belief. Wipe that superior sneer of your face and try smiling (if only inwardly) at the people/institutions/beliefs that you've waged your personal war against. Wouldn't it be more fun if you didn't run around quite so hard trying to be an individual, or fighting to prove or uphold your chosen belief-system? — Phil Hine

The stress and sadness of it all had been tough to handle, but there had also been a simmering, irrational resentment on his side. So yes, he had embraced a coping mechanism that he'd known Qhuinn hadn't approved of or liked. It had been a subversive, petty payback for sins the male wasn't actually committing. But — J.R. Ward

As for the tank, not only is it unAmerican and probably subversive to eat without watching stereo but also the racket from it would interfere even with a directional mike aimed at us from a distance . . . — Robert A. Heinlein

Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act ... Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical. — Naomi Klein

Chinese artists have been subversive over thousands of years, taking what they think of the government and embedding it in their art. There might be censorship of not going as far as they might. — Amy Tan

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. — Sheri Holman

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. — George Eliot

Sound and sound design has always been very important to my approach to film, because it is a more subversive and allusive aspect of the medium. — Larry Fessenden

If elementary training in neighbor love focuses on family and friends, in secondary neighbor-love studies, we learn to see the outlier, the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, the alien, and even the enemy as neighbors too. Such an education can be deeply subversive, some might even say unpatriotic. After all, political figures, military leaders, and rising demagogues consistently consolidate power by scapegoating and dehumanizing an outsider, an outcast, or an enemy. But — Brian McLaren

...And there really are men who believe in this, who spend their time in promoting Leagues of Peace, in delivering addresses, and in writing books; and of course the governments sympathize with it all, pretending that they approve of it; just as they pretend to support temperance, while they actually derive the larger part of their income from intemperance; just as they pretend to maintain liberty of the constitution, when it is the absence of liberty to which they owe their power; just as they pretend to care for the improvement of the laboring classes, while on oppression of the workman rest the very foundations of the State; just as they pretend to uphold Christianity, when Christianity is subversive of every government. — Leo Tolstoy

I despise my own past and that of others. I despise resignation, patience, professional heroism and all the obligatory sentiments. I also despise the decorative arts, folklore, advertising, radio announcers' voices, aerodynamics, the Boy Scouts, the smell of naphtha, the news, and drunks.
I like subversive humor, freckles, women's knees and long hair, the laughter of playing children, and a girl running down the street.
I hope for vibrant love, the impossible, the chimerical.
I dread knowing precisely my own limitations. — Rene Magritte