Top 100 Quotes About Subversive
#1. 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
#2. To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive; democracy treats subversives as mere opponents for fear of betraying its principles.
Jean Francois Revel
#3. I like the horror community because they're subversive. They question things. If something is held back from them, especially if they've heard that its good, they seek it out.
Michael Dougherty
#4. There's a great fear of the imagination. It's a dangerous thing. It's out of control, it's subversive.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#6. The political cartoon, in a way, is one of the highest forms of expression about our times. I don't believe in dramatic statements when it comes to political critique. It doesn't communicate in a way that's subversive enough.
Camille Henrot
#7. Reading and writing are in themselves subversive acts. What they subvert is the notion that things have to be the way they are, that you are alone, that no one has ever felt the way you have.
Mark Vonnegut
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. The stories in Get In Trouble confirm once again that Kelly Link is a modern virtuoso of the form-playful and subversive required reading for anyone who loves short fiction.
Jeff VanderMeer
#11. I am not a member of any organization listed by the Attorney General as subversive. In any instance where I lent my name in the past, it was certainly without knowledge that such an organization was subversive. I have always been essentially and foremost an American.
Judy Holliday
#12. 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
#13. The greatest crime is to do nothing because we can only do a little ( ... ) I feel nothing, because feeling is subversive and contrary to military discipline. Therefore I do not feel, but I fight and therefore I exist. (part I, chapter 10)
John Le Carre
#14. We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
Cornel West
#15. Daring greatly is not about winning or losing. It's about courage. In a world where scarcity and shame dominate and feeling afraid has become second nature, vulnerability is subversive.
Brene Brown
#16. If sex and creativity are often seen by dictators as subversive activities, it's because they lead to the knowledge that you own your own body (and with it your own voice), and that's the most revolutionary insight of all.
Erica Jong
#17. 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
#18. Indian nationalists and the government seem to believe that they can fortify their idea of a resurgent India with a combination of bullying and Boeing airplanes. But they don't understand the subversive strength of warm boiled eggs.
Arundhati Roy
#19. Fiction, on the whole, and if it is any good, tends to be a subversive element in society.
Fay Weldon
#20. A question is far more subversive, biblically, than a statement.
Os Guinness
#21. Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those easy speeches that comfort cruel men.
Timothy Garton Ash
#22. 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
#23. My only criticism about Quentin Crisp is that the subversive must be ready to subvert themselves. I may dress for myself, but I undress for everybody else, whereas he never did that - he was never prepared to drop a bomb on everything he did.
Sebastian Horsley
#24. 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
#25. There are some great, subversive female writers out there. Gender should not affect anything. It does, but it shouldn't.
Carla H. Krueger
#26. 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
#27. If, then, the ruler catches anybody beside himself lying in the State, 'Any of the craftsmen, whether he be priest or physician or carpenter,' he will punish him for introducing a practice which is equally subversive and destructive of ship or State. Most
Plato
#28. There is still such a thing as subversive. Subversive makes hip people nervous. It's something new that scares you in a good way. I mean, subversive to me is a compliment. Subversive is something that influences people to do something against society that they haven't thought of before.
John Waters
#29. Children live in occupied territory. The brave and the foolhardy openly rebel against authority, whether harsh or benign. But most tread warily, outwardly accommodating themselves to alien mores and edicts while living in secret their iconoclastic and subversive lives.
P.D. James
#30. I don't want to speak for my movies; you could say my movies are just completely silly and dumb, but in the case of 'Idiocracy' and 'Borat,' without a doubt there is a really subversive and sophisticated assault on American culture.
Adam McKay
#31. Parody by itself is not subversive, and there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony
Judith Butler
#32. My house was bugged. They couldn't find any information on me being a subversive because I happen to love America; I just don't like some of the things the government is doing.
Eartha Kitt
#33. I'm not into abuse. It's a given that I'm gentle with you. You're a man, and not young anymore. - Hakuou
Bohra Naono
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#38. Maybe there is no better novel in the world than Denton Welch's In Youth Is Pleasure. Just holding it in my hands, so precious, so beyond gay, so deliciously subversive, is enough to make illiteracy a worse social crime than hunger.
John Waters
#39. The Internet carries the flag of being subversive and possibly rebellious and chaotic, nihilistic.
David Bowie
#40. What is subversive today, will almost certainly be patriotic tomorrow.
Lucius Beebe
#41. Because even subversive sarcasm adds a cool-girl nonchalance, an updated, sharper version of the expectation that women be forever pleasant, even as we're eating shit.
Jessica Valenti
#42. For somebody to be on a search means he or she is involved with these subversive topics, reading and comparing notes with allies, asking questions, daydreaming, brooding. Even though you have homework to do.
Anne Lamott
#43. 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
#45. 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
#46. Everything serious in the world is well approached by humour. It's a powerful and often quite subversive tool. I suppose there is an argument that could be made against me for being frivolous, but I do think a laugh is a very generous thing to give.
Beeban Kidron
#47. 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
#48. We love Jesus as a baby on Christmas, and Jesus risen from the grave on Easter, but somehow we miss Jesus the man, the teacher, the sage, the rebel, the subversive King, the local hero, the neighborhood friend.
Hugh Halter
#49. To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. My mantra was to educate people - to actually give them the know-how they could use - and to do it in a very subversive kind of way. I would entertain them, and I was going to teach them whether they knew it or not.
Alton Brown
#53. Sometimes with certain writing, you feel like you've got to be literal, hit it hard on the nose, just to get the point across. Good writing is more subversive I think - or good scenes. They are about one thing on the page but you can make it about something completely different.
Chace Crawford
#54. I loved the idea of a subversive world where mental illness was defined as just another version of normal, and education was how you made your way in the world, not something that began or ended.
Heather Sellers
#55. 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
#56. It is not the writer's task to answer questions but to question answers. To be impertinent, insolent, and, if necessary, subversive.
Edward Abbey
#57. Grace does not contest the powers-that-be through an effective show of verifiable strength but through a persistent and subversive recoding of how one defines what strength and weakness are.
Adam Miller
#58. Art is inherently subversive. It's destabilizing. It undermines what you already know and what you already think. It is the opposite of propaganda.
Deborah Eisenberg
#59. 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
#60. I think it's much more radical to see and show things as they look instead of making them somehow subversive through alienation or estrangement.
Wolfgang Tillmans
#61. He watched and recorded their subversive activites with love, amusement, and detachment.
Kurt Vonnegut
#62. I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
Alice Sebold
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. The secret subversive goal of my work is to show that women, not just lesbians, are regular human beings.
Alison Bechdel
#67. 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
#68. Libraries are innately subversive institutions, born of the radical notion that every member of society deserves free, high-quality access to knowledge and culture.
Matt Finch
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. I don't think of myself as being particulary a subversive writer, but I like to think that my work could afford someone else, the extra degree of freedom that I found when I first found science fiction.
William Gibson
#72. If I were a 13-year-old and I wanted to create subversive art, I wouldn't go out and buy an electric guitar. I'd get myself a personal computer.
Thomas Dolby
#73. 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
#74. What's disappointing is that it's just another mold, you leave one cliche and end up right back in another. Not really that subversive or out of control.
Virginie Despentes
#75. What is art? Art talks about life; it's subversive.
Tahar Rahim
#76. I was always the new kid, and I got to know the language and the politics of being on the outside, looking in. Never being in the clique - always being a student of the clique, a subversive, and I could look around and identify the other guys who were excluded.
Padgett Powell
#77. The subversive idea at the centre of Ericsson's work is that excellence is not reserved for the lucky few but can be achieved by almost all of us.
Matthew Syed
#78. The early Christians felt a deep collision with the empire in which they lived, and with politics as usual. They carelessly crossed party lines and built subversive friendships. And we should do that too.
Shane Claiborne
#79. Producers are men who will keep their heads in the noisy presence of writers and directors and not be carried away by art in any of its subversive guises. Their task is to guard against the unusual. They are the trusted loyalists of cliche.
Ben Hecht
#80. Ultimately, Photography is subversive, not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.
Roland Barthes
#81. I seem to myself, among civilized men, an intruder, a troglodyte enamored of decrepitude, plunged into subversive prayers.
Emile M. Cioran
#82. The poor have often been subversive just because they don't always believe their own depiction as brutes and loafers and leeches, and new economy is making lots more poor or recognize their fellowship with the insecurity of the poor, the portion of the population for whom the system does not work.
Rebecca Solnit
#83. During the darkest periods in recent history, of course, the most subversive things you could do is think, read if you can get the material and remind yourself that love exists.
Hector Elizondo
#84. Art is something subversive. It's something that should not be free. Art and liberty, like the fire of Prometheus, are things that one must steal, to be used against the established order.
Pablo Picasso
#85. Friendship is a creative and subversive force. It claims that intimacy is the secret law of life and universe.
John O'Donohue
#86. Each of you possesses the most powerful, dangerous and subversive trait that natural selection has ever devised. It's a piece of neural audio technology for rewiring other people's minds. I'm talking about your language.
Mark Pagel
#87. If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession's responsibilities.
Samuel Mockbee
#88. Non-operational ideas are non-behavioral and subversive. The movement of thought is stopped at barriers which appear as the limits of Reason itself.
Herbert Marcuse
#89. If you want to keep people subjugated, the last thing you place in their hands is a Bible. There's nothing more radical, nothing more revolutionary, nothing more subversive against injustice and oppression than the Bible.
Desmond Tutu
#90. It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.
Stephen Fry
#91. Fashion is the opposite of the real, its worst enemy. Fashion photography is subversive; it makes you believe everything is true, whereas this could not be more false. It is the opposite of a mirror, a deformation.
Patrick Demarchelier
#92. People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth
Raoul Vaneigem
#93. I know everybody wants humor to be subversive and speak truth to power. I don't think power's been listening, incidentally.
Robert Mankoff
#94. The danger of sending your children to college was that they would be contaminated by subversive forces, bad influences and bawdy women.
Rolled with laughter. Parent's fear, college student's desire.
Jean Thompson
#95. I have more respect for somebody who points at his ideal - in this case, the ideal of the pirate - and then becomes something that's more radical, more exciting, more subversive than a pirate could ever be.
Will Oldham
#96. Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.
Randy Alcorn
#97. 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
#98. I was a mimic when I was a child. I mimicked the teacher and made friends that way, actually. That was a very subversive activity, because I was a goody-goody who never got in trouble. But if I went off in the corner and mimicked the teacher, people loved it.
Anna Deavere Smith
#100. Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive.
Henry Steele Commager
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