Subversives Quotes & Sayings

I'll shout out to James L. Brooks. 'Terms of Endearment' always makes me cry. Also, 'Stepmom' always makes me cry. I guess, you know, mothers dying. It's a safe bet that I'm going to cry. — Sarah Steele

My star was fading, I felt the reins slipping out of my grasp, and could do nothing to stop it. — Napoleon Bonaparte

Revolutionaries who come to power by force of arms usually have great crimes in their background. Leaders who survive campaigns by great powers to destroy them do not survive because they observe the niceties of law. Subversives who shape world events by covert action and violence work in shadows and detest the light of day. — Stephen Kinzer

He went through the vehicle usage manual in his head and recalled the simulator training. Then he unlocked the car, ushered her in, and started the engine. All went well until he rammed into the car parked in front. — Cari Silverwood

The conservation movement is a breeding ground of Communists and other subversives. We intend to clean them out, even if it means rounding up every bird watcher in the country. — John N. Mitchell

The new Constitution will promote the "general" welfare, not welfare varying by condition or by place of residence. It will secure our liberties - against whom? There's an ambiguity here; liberty could be secured against foreign enemies and domestic subversives, or against the new government itself. The latter interpretation is soothing to American ears; but in this context, it seems far-fetched. The clause appears in a list of things government is to do, not things it is not to do; a list of powers, not of prohibitions. The new government, it would appear, is not the enemy of liberty but its chief agent and protector. The purpose then, in its most plausible reading, is to create a strong, active, national government, one whose benefits will flow directly to the people who create it. — Garrett Epps

It would serve the Americans right if we emptied the prisons and let the subversives take power. They'd soon show Washington just how much they appreciate good old American values. — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi

If democracy is destroyed in Britain it will be not the communists, Trotskyists or subversives but this House which threw it away. The rights that are entrusted to us are not for us to give away. Even if I agree with everything that is proposed, I cannot hand away powers lent to me for five years by the people of Chesterfield. I just could not do it. It would be theft of public rights. — Tony Benn

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.'
'What sort of tools?'
'More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is charged with a crime. A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest. Laws establishing detention camps for potential subversives. Gun control laws. Restrictions on travel. The assassinations, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason - or are manipulated into reasoning - that the entire population must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the leaders. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted. — Robert Anton Wilson

Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes angry. — Euripides

Whoever desires to remain faithful to Jesus must communicate faith as he did, not by compelling assent but by presenting it as a true answer to basic thirst. Rather than looking back nostalgically on a time when Christians wielded more power, I suggest another approach: that we regard ourselves as subversives operating within the broader culture. — Philip Yancey

It proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, or our lives, by buying something more.
This more, it proposes,will make us in some way richer - even though we will be poorer by having spent our money.
Publicity persuades us of such a transformation by showing us people who have apparently been transformed and are, as a result, enviable. The state of being envied is what constitutes glamour. And publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour. (P. 125) — John Berger

To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles. — Jean Francois Revel

Fear festers in the imagination. It's not fear's fault. That's just the way it's made. Nightmares breed. Allies become enemies. Subversives are everywhere. Paranoia justifies any persecution, and privacy is a luxury when the Reds have the bomb. — Lauren Beukes

There is ... a huge tacit conspiracy between the U.S. government, its agencies and its multinational corporations, on the one hand, and local business and military cliques in the Third World, on the other, to assume complete control of these countries and "develop" them on a joint venture basis. The military leaders of the Third World were carefully nurtured by the U.S. security establishment to serve as the "enforcers" of this joint venture partnership, and they have been duly supplied with machine guns and the latest data on methods of interrogation of subversives. — Edward S. Herman

Even when they call us mad, when they call us subversives and communists and all the epithets they put on us, we know we only preach the subversive witness of the Beatitudes, which have turned everything upside down. — Oscar Romero

Two conditions of self-sustaining growth are that a country has acquired a cadre of domestic entrepreneurs and administrators and, secondly, that it has attained to adequate savings and taxable capacity. — Arthur Lewis

Most guys at Berklee are going to wind up truck drivers ... — Pat Metheny

The second I learned to read in first grade, when I was 5, I preferred it to life. And I still do. — Fran Lebowitz

It just felt like the right thing to do to give back to a state school and public school. I'm a really big fan of public education. — Brendan Iribe

Our entire society's based on discontent: people wanting more and more and more, being constantly dissatisfied with their homes, their bodies, their decor, their clothes, everything. Taking it for granted that that's the whole point of life, never to be satisfied. If you're perfectly happy with what you've got - specially if what you've got isn't even all that spectacular - then you're dangerous. You're breaking all the rules, you're undermining the sacred economy, you're challenging every assumption that society's built on. That's why Rafe's dad throws a mickey fit whenever Rafe says he's happy where he is. The way he sees it, we're all subversives. We're traitors. — Tana French

Trust a girl of sixteen for knowing well if she is pretty; concerning her plainness she may be ignorant. — Elizabeth Gaskell

It is not the practice, now will I allow subversives to get away by insisting that I've got to prove everything against them in a court of law or [produce] evidence that will stand up to the strict rules of evidence of a court of law. — Lee Kuan Yew

Jesus was not crucified for being a good citizen, for being just a little nicer than everyone else. The powers of his day correctly saw him and his followers as subversives because they took orders from a higher power than Rome or Jerusalem. What would a subversive church look like in the modern United States? — Philip Yancey

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance. — Leo Tolstoy

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

The trouble is, I'm a terrible PR person, — Peter Molyneux

America's most dangerous internal threat, he felt, came not from communist subversives but from those who used the fear of communists to trample civil liberties. "America is incomparably less endangered by its own Communists than by the hysterical hunt for the few Communists that are here," he told the socialist leader Norman Thomas. — Walter Isaacson

I am somewhat of a meliorist. That is to say, I act as an optimist because I find I cannot act at all, as a pessimist. One often feels helpless in the face of the confusion of these times, such a mass of apparently uncontrollable events and experiences to live through, attempt to understand, and if at all possible, give order to; but one must not withdraw from the task if he has some small things to offer - he does so at the risk of diminishing his humanity. — Bernard Malamud