Top 100 Quotes About Defiance
#1. The modern moralists extol ... the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.
Julien Benda
#2. Free me as free is the forest fire, as is the thunder that laughs aloud and hurls defiance to darkness.
Rabindranath Tagore
#3. But don't raise your eyes in defiance,
Protect my life, my dear.
They're brighter than first violets,
But deadly to me, I fear.
Anna Akhmatova
#4. As one, they leap, laughing, and that is where we leave them - mouths open, arms spread wide, fingers splayed to take in the whole world, bodies flying high in defiance of gravity, as if they will never fall.
Libba Bray
#5. The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy.
Ben Macintyre
#6. And if the many sayings of the wise
Teach of submission I will not submit
But with a spirit all unreconciled
Flash an unquenched defiance to the stars.
Adelaide Crapsey
#7. Hawk soared over our carriage, letting out a high, piercing cry of defiance, and I wanted to jump out of the window and fly with it
Stephanie Burgis
#8. Throughout history
even a hundred years ago, even fifty
it was discontent that was considered the threat to society, the defiance of natural law, the danger that had to be exterminated at all costs. Now it's contentment,
Tana French
#9. Shall I tell you what the real evil is? To cringe to the things that are called evils, to surrender to them our freedom, in defiance of which we ought to face any suffering.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
#10. How does someone domesticate a horse?" "They break it," I said with a hint of defiance. "Do I look broken to you?" "Looks
Robert J. Crane
#11. Defiance means you got somebody with power over you.
Pearl Cleage
#12. Fuck you and your memories."
"And fuck you and your defiance, Dayton.
Emma Hart
#13. Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.
Bernard Bailyn
#14. You have a terrible beauty that scares me - a fierce defiance that won't be subdued - not that i want to tame you - I don't - I like to look ...
John Geddes
#15. Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.
Matt Haig
#16. The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world.
Eric Hoffer
#17. Heaped up on the blankets, our bodies bound by weariness and her deep slumber, surrounded by sickness and hope, death and defiance, I touched the soft surrendered curl of Karla's sleeping fingers to my lips, and I pledged my heart to her forever.
Gregory David Roberts
#18. The very act of accepting her position at Mademoiselle was an act of open defiance against Dick Norton, his entire family, and the gendered expectations of midcentury America.
Elizabeth Winder
#19. Anarchism ... stands for direct action, the open defiance of, and resistance to, all laws and restrictions, economic, social, and moral.
Emma Goldman
#20. I don't know if I have some kind of defiance disorder or something, but if I'm hired to write something by "The Man," or by a studio, for whatever reason, it's really hard for me to finish. I inevitably wind up using that time to write something else.
Diablo Cody
#21. It was so crazy, lucky, that 'Defiance' and 'Hemlock Grove' was shooting in Toronto at the same time. I got to be on both of them.
Kaniehtiio Horn
#22. The cigarette represents a simple pleasure coupled with self-destruction and defiance of death. Melodrama
Benjamin Doolin
#23. A wasteland is a confrontation to a man of stature: an empty place, a gauntlet thrown down in challenge and defiance. A place like that cries out to be conquered and civilised.
John C. Wright
#24. Imagination is intervention, an act of defiance. It alters belief.
David Mura
#25. As we passed he returned grimly to his task, though his arthritic hands could hardly close around the stick. There was something almost regal about him, I thought; a defiance I admired. He was a holdout who refused to give up his post. The last watchmen at the end of the world.
Ransom Riggs
#26. Remember your created limits. So much of workaholism is a defiance of the physical limitations that God our creator has imposed upon us.
Tim Challies
#27. Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You're going to confuse, piss off, and terrify lots of people - including yourself. One
Brene Brown
#28. In the face of such terror and dehumanization, human passion itself was an act of defiance.
Guillermo Del Toro
#29. Sin is not an unfortunate slip or a regrettable act; it is a posture of defiance against a holy God.
Max Lucado
#30. I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson
#31. He held the flag like a banner of defiance. 'You can take our lives but you'll never take our freedom!' he screamed.
Carcer's men looked at one another, puzzled by what sounded like the most badly thought-out war cry in the history of the universe.
Terry Pratchett
#32. Under Clinton, the defiance of world order has become so extreme as to be of concern even to hawkish policy analysts.
Noam Chomsky
#33. Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.
Ayn Rand
#34. She stares straight into the camera, eyes narrowed. She wears an expression I've not seen from her before. Disgust? Defiance? She looks nothing like the woman I've known my entire life.
Shannon Duffy
#35. To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen.
Jerome Groopman
#36. My nose never lies," he boasted. "I can smell defiance, I can smell pride, I can smell disobedience. I catch a whiff of any such stinks, you'll answer for it. When I sniff you, all I want to smell is fear
George R R Martin
#37. I intend to bring you strength, joy, courage, perspicacity, defiance.
Andre Gide
#38. The sets on 'Defiance' are incredible. I've never really seen a set like this, where the world is so built around us. There's not too much left for us to have to imagine.
Stephanie Leonidas
#39. The bold defiance of a woman is the certain sign of her shame, - when she has once ceased to blush, it is because she has too much to blush for.
Charles Maurice De Talleyrand
#40. Nature seems to welcome defiance of conventions, and to say, with a smile, 'So, the truant has come back again!' ("Absolute Evil")
Julian Hawthorne
#42. What if a puppet could cut its own strings, and in that act of defiance and strength of will become truly alive? Become is own puppetmaster?
Barry Lyga
#43. Her face reflecting the color of her dress, she glowed even in her disappointment ... perhaps the way of her defiance to the fate.
Madhu Vajpayee
#44. If ever I feel the soul within me elevate and expand to those dimensions not wholly unworthy of its Almighty Architect, it is when I contemplate the cause of my country, deserted by all the world beside, and I standing up boldly and lone and hurling defiance at her victorious oppressors.
Abraham Lincoln
#45. There's a strength in that look, a wilfulness; one would almost call it defiance except that it is so good-humoured. It is the look a woman would wear - would have worn - if she asked a man, a stranger, say, to dance.
Ahdaf Soueif
#46. Writing is a labor of love and also an act of defiance, a way to light a candle in a gale wind.
Alice Childress
#47. With temerity and defiance, obstinance and patience, she chipped away at every hard edge of me until there was nothing left but the truths I feared. The bent and broken.
K. Bromberg
#48. After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble.
Richard Russo
#49. To replace bricks with bricks is restoration," he said. "But to replace bricks with hewn stone is defiance. To rebuild what was destroyed is restoration, but to boast of rebuilding stronger and greater than before is defiance.
Jonathan Cahn
#50. But the safety of the world, in some sense, depends on your saying no to inhumane ideas. Standing up for one's own integrity makes you no friends. It is costly. Yet defiance of the mob, in the service of that which is right, is one of the highest expressions of courage I know.
Gabrielle Giffords
#51. Raeder, the political admiral, stealthily built up the German Navy in defiance of the Versailles Treaty, and then put it to use in a series of aggressions which he had taken a leading part in planning.
Erich Raeder
#52. There is no week nor day nor hour when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their roughness and spirit of defiance.
Walt Whitman
#53. I say to myself if you believe deeply in your heart you must defy, and if you are willing to pay for your defiance, you must always do it, even though the pain may be much. Too many times in our lives we do not do it, and we pay even more ...
James Frey
#54. Defiance is beautiful. The defiance of power, especially great or overwhelming power, exalts and glorifies the rebel.
Edward Abbey
#55. It was an act of defiance against your leaders ... Ready to stifle the truth, and for what? To be kings of their tiny world?Its ridiculous.
Veronica Roth
#56. libido, or concupiscence, a tending toward certain things in defiance of rational restraint.
Fulton J. Sheen
#57. Kneel!" he ordered.
My head raised in defiance, I stepped forward. "I am Princess Andrea de Montemaior. I will kneel to no one," I said to the shadows inside.
Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban
#58. To trust in your own aliveness, in your own ability to sustain and be sustained - there are times when there is no greater act of defiance.
Jessica Fechtor
#59. Away from her lips. She controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness turned to her play. But Deronda's gaze seemed to have acted as an evil eye. Her stake was gone. No
George Eliot
#60. Enoch considered the defiance in the painted eyes and the subtle perversion expressed with curling lips, and then he touched a pair of frozen lips as if the smiling portrait might whisper some secret word into his hand.
W.H. Pugmire
#61. She never forgets a slight, real or imagined. She takes caution for cowardice and dissent for defiance. And she is greedy. Greedy for power, for honour, for love.
George R R Martin
#62. It did not seem to matter whether I was present or not. After a time I became resentful, feeling that the flowers mocked me, blooming in defiance of my listless misery.
Sally Brampton
#63. Til shade is gone,
til water is gone
Into the shadow with teeth bared
Screaming defiance with the last breath
To spit in Sightblinder's eye on the Last Day.
Robert Jordan
#64. Hope is not naive, and hope is not an opiate. Hope may be the single greatest act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and against a culture of despair.
Sharon Brous
#65. In defiance of all the tortue, of all the might, of all the malice of the world, the liberal man will ever be rich; for God's providence is his estate, God's wisdom and power are his defence, God's love and favor are his reward, and God's word is his security.
Isaac Barrow
#67. Scarlet loved wearing red. She treated it like an act of defiance given her red hair. Michelle
Marissa Meyer
#68. I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.
Rene Magritte
#69. The goddamn kid just sat there and out of the blue thrust his middle finger in the air and waved it at Jon with a brazen defiance only ten-year-olds and Nazis can muster.
Max Allan Collins
#70. Life, especially human life, was an act of defiance. It was never meant to be, and yet it existed in an incredible number of places across a near-infinite number of solar systems.
Matt Haig
#71. And that's how you go on. You lay laughter over the dark parts. The more dark parts, the more you have to laugh. With defiance, with abandon, with hysteria, any way you can.
Laini Taylor
#72. There comes a time when deceit and defiance must be seen for what they are. At that point, a gathering danger must be directly confronted. At that point, we must show that beyond our resolutions is actual resolve.
Dick Cheney
#73. Mrs. Parks' act of brave defiance rocked the foundation of American society and inspired generations of civil rights leaders and created a sense of hope for every American facing legal discrimination in this country.
Kendrick Meek
#74. Tragedy is a storm we all must weather, my friend. To let it break you is the worst tragedy of all. Instead we stand tall in defiance and wear a smile when all reason for smiling has left us.
Michael James Ploof
#75. He can make even the act of putting on his dressing gown appear as a gesture of defiance.
Vincent Tilsley
#76. Sometimes there is no hope," whispered Das.
"There's always some hope, Mr. Das."
"No, Mr. Luczak, there is not. Sometimes there is only pain. And acquiescence to pain. And, perhaps, defiance at the world which demands such pain."
"Defiance is a form of hope, is it not, sir?
Dan Simmons
#77. I hope we shall ... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country.
Thomas Jefferson
#78. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of Murray's Grammar, and was garnished at convenient intervals with various profane expressions, which not even the desire to be graphic in our account shall induce us to transcribe.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#79. Foolish defiance was his lifelong response to being ill.
Paul C. Nagel
#80. There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#81. Their monstrous forms represent the perverse defiance of normal categories and the confusion of identity associated with social and cosmic disorder.
Karen Armstrong
#82. Another great illusion that woman must ... destroy .. is the impurity of sex, the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex - except in the mental attitude toward it ...
Mina Loy
#83. The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.
Isabel Wilkerson
#84. He (God) permits, for reasons known only to Himself, people to act contrary to and in defiance of His revealed will. But He never permits them to act contrary to His sovereign will.
Jerry Bridges
#85. Was looked at askance, and that in the bearing of each member of the group there was a defiance of the general opinion. Roxholm sat on his horse somewhat apart from this group watching it, his kinsman and
Frances Hodgson Burnett
#86. She thinks petting me is an honor. This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention.
Kevin Hearne
#87. If only I were a magician who could make things possible. I'd give objects the gift of defiance: banisters, gramaphones, guns, the napes of necks, braided hair.
Sasa Stanisic
#88. The photographer had caught her midlaugh, and the defiance of her bared teeth and wide lips gave her face a hint of mischief and forthrightness. The girl in this photograph bet the house.
Libba Bray
#89. Either way, you were connected. By your desires. By your defiance. By the simple, complicated fact of who you were.
David Levithan
#90. Heavy gold watch-chain, with a bundle of seals of portentous size, and a great variety of colors, attached to it, - which, in the ardor of conversation, he was in the habit of flourishing and jingling with evident satisfaction. His conversation was in free and easy defiance of
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#91. The old Ivy feared parental reaction from each tiny act of defiance. But the new Ivy says, "Fuck 'em all!" a sentiment that Rachel will surely appreciate. My new motto? Be who you are and own that shit-because only with true self-acceptance comes peace and joy.
B.L. Berry
#92. It appeared clear to me - partly because of the lies that filled my history textbooks - that the intent of formal education was to inculcate obedience to a social order that did not deserve my loyalty. Defiance seemed the only dignified response to the adult world.
Timothy B. Tyson
#93. The sole thing that had kept him from going on and hunting her down had been an enraged defiance against a sexual pull that had begun to turn into an obsession.
Nalini Singh
#94. You all have learned reliance
On the sacred teachings of Science,
So I hope, through life, you will never decline
In spite of philistine Defiance
To do what all good scientists do.
Experiment.
Make it your motto day and night.
Experiment.
And it will lead you to the light.
Cole Porter
#95. The New York Times reports that Moammar Gadhafi spent his last days hovering between defiance and delusion, surviving on rice and pasta. In other words, Gadhafi spent his last days as a sophomore in college. That's what I did.
Conan O'Brien
#96. We secured peace for our country for one and a half years, as well as an opportunity of preparing our forces for defense if fascist Germany risked attacking our country in defiance of the pact. This was a definite gain to our country and a loss for fascist Germany.
Joseph Stalin
#97. He would never be able to emulate Richard's last gesture of defiance
gallant, glorious, and quite mad.
Sharon Kay Penman
#98. I like to joke that I probably hold the world record for rejection letters. Yes, the truth is that I was fed up of being rejected repeatedly, and self-publication was an act of defiance at traditional publishing. But life works in strange ways.
Ashwin Sanghi
#99. They were obviously headstones of graves, though the graves themselves no longer existed as either mounds or depressions; the years had leveled all. Scattered here and there, more massive blocks showed where some pompous or ambitious monument had once flung its feeble defiance at oblivion.
Ambrose Bierce
#100. The poorest man in his cottage may bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow through it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter - but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement!
Barbara W. Tuchman
