Top 100 Quotes About Reactionary
#1. If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas ... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be.
Georges Braque
#2. A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.
Michel Houellebecq
#3. I've said that anyone who doesn't contradict himself is a dogmatist, and every dogmatist is a reactionary.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
#4. As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.
Kenneth Rexroth
#5. I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life)
Gerhard Richter
#7. Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them.
Neve McIntosh
#8. Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I'm going to continue fighting for the end user.
Gary Vaynerchuk
#9. We took the name 'Liberal' because we were determined to be a progressive party, willing to make experiments, in no sense reactionary but believing in the individual, his rights, and his enterprise, and rejecting the socialist panacea.
Robert Menzies
#10. Revolutions and revolutionary wars are inevitable in class society, and without them it is impossible to accomplish any leap in social development and to overthrow the reactionary ruling classes and therefore impossible for the people to win political power.
Mao Zedong
#11. By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative', one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary', one who won't go at all.
Woodrow Wilson
#12. Fighting to scale back a reactionary initiative is one thing. Supporting the scaled back version, though, is a betrayal when the scaled back version does exactly the same thing just not as much. This sort of thing is a strategy for the ACLU.
Anonymous
#13. Let's see," mused the dragon, "that doesn't tell us much, does it? What sort of a word is this? Is it an epithet, do you think?"
Gawaine could do no more than nod.
"Why, of course," exclaimed the dragon, "reactionary Republican.
Heywood Broun
#14. American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.
Jay Parini
#15. You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life.
Henry Cabot Lodge
#16. An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary.
Lion Feuchtwanger
#17. I'm fairly conservative on social issues, but not extremely conservative and not reactionary.
John Howard
#18. We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.
Saul Williams
#19. I think my role as a musician is much more reactionary than that of the creative personality type who locks himself in a tower and then comes out with Pet Sounds or something. I just respond to stimuli more than anything.
Blake Mills
#20. In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell.
Arthur Miller
#21. What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We've termed this 'reactionary angiogenesis.'
Patrick Soon-Shiong
#22. Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz.
Ken Livingstone
#23. When a minister or a clergyman takes seriously unfashionable Christian doctrines which condemn sex outside marriage, homosexuality, abortion, and feminism, and injects his views into the political debate, he is immediately denounced as a 'reactionary.'
Benjamin Hart
#24. The life is worth living. It's not true, what the tired and reactionary say. We're not on this earth to suffer and die. We're here to fulfill a mission.
Joseph Goebbels
#25. America was not interventionist enough, which, of course, did mean a bit of a breach with old comrades on the left. I felt the international left in the countries concerned took the same position as I did. So, in my view, it's the left that's become reactionary and isolationist and parochial.
Christopher Hitchens
#26. Being a reactionary is not about believing in certain solutions, but about having an acute sense of the complexity of the problems.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#27. The intelligent man quickly reaches reactionary conclusions.
Today, however, the universal consensus of fools turns him into a coward.
When they interrogate him in public, he denies being a Galilean.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#29. Our great leader, Chairman Mao, has taught us, 'Every reactionary is the same; if you do not hit him, he will not fall. This is also like sweeping the floor; as a rule, where the broom does not reach, the dust will not vanish by itself.'" Her
Ji-li Jiang
#30. I think tolerance is something everybody needs to be reminded of, especially in a reactionary political world. Well, actually, I should say, a reactionary political climate.
Bruce Davison
#31. A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.
Alasdair MacIntyre
#32. A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.
Trofim Lysenko
#33. The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.
Hanya Yanagihara
#34. We are ripples of consciousness of the vast ocean of consciousness. If we get agitated and become part of the reactionary and vitriolic behavior sometimes around us, we will only add to the disturbance.
Deepak Chopra
#35. A reactionary is anyone who is not prepared to buy his victory at any price.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#36. Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.
Chuck Klosterman
#37. California is the most reactionary state in America. Fascist sentiments are very strong here.
Ilya Ilf
#38. When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.
Andrew Sullivan
#39. Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.
Mikhail Bakunin
#40. A great army of the proletarian party [must be] prepared to smash the reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced forces of society.
J. Stalin
#41. Urging others to read F. Scott Fitzgerald, if not a reactionary act, was not something one could do in 1968.
Haruki Murakami
#42. We do not have the right to forget that reactionary imperialism exists and its forces actively operate in the world, that they encourage the arms race and that they try to restore the spirit of the Cold War.
Andrei Grechko
#43. I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring.
Pat Conroy
#44. Reactionary nostalgia for the proprieties of Victorian England is unfortunate, like a whore looking under the bed for her virginity.
Bruce Robinson
#45. Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them.
Slavoj Zizek
#46. But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.
Huey Newton
#47. There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation.
Spruille Braden
#48. The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march
Bhagat Singh
#49. Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose.
Richard Rohr
#50. Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind.
Louis MacNeice
#51. The radical and the reactionary loathe the present. They see it as an aberration and a deformity. Both are ready to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly with the present, and both are hospitable to the idea of self-sacrifice.
Eric Hoffer
#52. Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.
Calvin Coolidge
#53. Revolution is progressive and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance.
The revolutionary is a potential government official; the rebel is a reactionary in action.
Nicolas Gomez Davila
#54. It's a constant process for me to learn to take the time to really understand what hurt me and how best to address it or respond. I tend to be reactionary, and that doesn't help me or others. I do try to keep my heart open.
Laura Regan
#55. And it's not like I'm the only guy in history to ever get a hard on in a high school locker room; for a lot of guys it's just a natural reaction to the cool moist air. But the trouble is that around certain guys, I'm radically reactionary.
Huston Piner
#56. There's a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynist hatred, this reactionary backlash against women who have anything to say, especially those who have critiques or who are feminists.
Anita Sarkeesian
#57. The most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. - These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.
Erich Maria Remarque
#58. If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress.
Isabel Paterson
#59. I very much dislike doctrinaire liberals - they want to own your minds. And I don't like reactionary conservatives. I like to face issues in terms of conditions and not in terms of someone's inborn political philosophy.
Carl Albert
#60. Well, there's a lot to react against![in response to the accusation that she was a reactionary]
Margaret Thatcher
#61. Under the white population of the United States of America only the reactionary classes oppres the black population. Under no circumstance can they represent the workers, farmers and revolutionary intellectuals and other enlighted people who form the majority of the white population.
Mao Tse-tung
#62. The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#64. Earnestness is good; it means business. But fanaticism overdoes, and is consequently reactionary.
Charles Spurgeon
#65. Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip.
Susan Sontag
#66. It is only with burning anger that we can speak of this attack by counter-revolutionary reactionary elements against the capital of our country, against our people's democratic order and the power of the working class.
Janos Kadar
#67. It seems to be generally acknowledged that sexism is far from defeated, flourishing through religions and other reactionary ideologies, which would definitely and gladly erase the concept of feminism.
Laura Mulvey
#68. Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.
Anton Rubinstein
#69. Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.
Ann Voskamp
#70. The middle man governs, however extreme may seem to be the men who sit on the Front Bench, in their reactionary or revolutionary opinions.
Beatrice Webb
#71. [There are] judges who stretch the law ... to suit reactionary attitudes.
Michael Foot
#73. Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary.
Josip Broz Tito
#74. Look for the enemies of Medicare, of higher minimum wages, of Social Security, of federal aid to education and there you will find the enemy of the Negro, the coalition of Dixiecrats and reactionary Republicans that seek to dominate the Congress.
A. Philip Randolph
#75. Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.
Christopher Hitchens
#76. I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people.
Alexander Mackenzie
#77. If you can train yourself to be actionable instead of reactionary, you will break out of the negative space that is typically furnished with fear, uncertainty and inaction, and move into that peaceful zone of determination, power, decisiveness and growth. Life will become less complicated.
Carlos Wallace
#78. To-day, in more than half of Europe, man is at the mercy of the police; in 1900 even the most conservative and reactionary Prussian Junker would have been unable to imagine, let alone approve, that a citizen could be arrested and kept in prision at the pleasure of the Government.
Salvador De Madariaga
#79. Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.
Aneurin Bevan
#80. Many conservatives see higher education as a threat to their reactionary and corporate oriented interests and would like to defund higher education, privatize it, eliminate tenure, and define the working conditions of faculty to something resembling the labor practices of Walmart workers.
Henry Giroux
#81. No influence so quickly converts a radical into a reactionary as does his election to power.
Elisabeth Marbury
#82. Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes.
Jack Schwartz
#83. The continuous war between the reactionary and the progressive forces determine the degree of mankind's happiness.
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#84. Other words used in variable meanings, in most cases more or less dishonestly, are: class, totalitarian, science, progressive, reactionary, bourgeois, equality. Now
George Orwell
#85. In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally.
Katharine Whitehorn
#86. The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.
Noam Chomsky
#87. It's very clear you have to engage the public and say: You have to vote no on 74, no on 75, no on 76, no on 77. Those are the issues that Arnold pushing. And those are reactionary, Republican initiatives.
Warren Beatty
#88. Tolkien seems to me reactionary, conservative, fearful of a modern world. Fearful of anything that isn't sanctioned by the passage of long eons of time. I think what I'm doing in His Dark Materials is politically the reverse of that.
Philip Pullman
#89. The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead.
Theodore Roosevelt
#90. The strongest reactionary force impeding progress is the cult of progress itself, which, cutting us off from our roots, makes growth impossible and choice unnecessary.
John Senior
#91. The politics of those whose goal is beyond time are always pacific; it is the idolaters of past and future, of reactionary memory and Utopian dream, who do the persecuting and make the wars.
Aldous Huxley
#92. Everything TSA does is reactionary - first they ban the box cutters, then of course you have to take your shoes off, then you have to take the liquids out, now we have to be patted down in our private areas because of the diaper bomber.
John Mica
#94. Being conservative has never been regarded as old-fashioned. But if you fight for a sensible step in the right direction which others has deserted you will be branded "reactionary".
Poul Henningsen
#95. The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary.
G.K. Chesterton
#96. The salvation of the young mind and the freeing of it from the noxious reactionary beliefs of their parents is one of the highest aims of the proletarian government.
Nikolai Bukharin
#97. To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising.
Richard Hofstadter
#98. The right is so reactionary it goes nowhere.
Tom Metzger
#99. Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time.
John Brockman
#100. Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world.
Christopher Hitchens
