Rebellion Quotes

All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived. Physical rebellion, or any preliminary move toward rebellion, is at present not possible. From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is. They could only become dangerous if the advance of industrial technique made it necessary to educate them more highly; but since military and commercial rivalry are no longer important, the level of popular education is actually declining. What opinions the masses hold,or do not hold, is looked on as matter of indifference. They can me granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

~ George Orwell

What is the good of telling a community that it has every liberty except the liberty to make laws? The liberty to make laws is what constitutes a free people.

~ G.k. Chesterton

The way I look at it is this: If you try to obey the law, and the judges call you a criminal anyway, then you might as well live up to the name.

~ Ken Liu

I am a hypocrite when it comes to being a conformist. My values and beliefs are part of my foundation of who I am. My frame work as you would say. But my life experiences are the bricks of the walls as I build my life and for that I am not a conformist I am a rebel.

~ Bonnie Zackson Koury

Clinton had displayed his lifelong tendency to make enemies of all his superiors, who never seemed to appreciate his advice as much as he thought it deserved.

~ Joseph J. Ellis

We are usually on bended knee before laws or angrily reacting against them, both immature responses.

~ Richard Rohr

Rebellion without reprisal is one of democracy's perks, right?

~ Laura Kelly

If the authorities under various false pretenses, continue curtailing the rights of citizens, so that they merely become serfs to a handful of multinational companies, a global rebellion of ordinary people against super capitalism is certainly not inconceivable.

~ A.j. Beirens

Just because something bears the aspect of the inevitable one should not, therefore, go along willingly with it.

~ Philip K. Dick

With a smile of grim satisfaction, he bellowed his call. And the rebels surged forward in an act that would be remembered for ten thousand years.

~ Brian Herbert

An objection was made that judging what had already been done to me, if we proceeded some of us would most certainly be killed. And several others, each in their own language, countered that the way we were living here, the way we were treated, we might as well be dead already, that things couldn't get worse. Things can always get worse, someone yelled from the back, when you reach hell there is always another hell underneath.

~ Jacob Wren

Dominance. Control. These things the unjust seek most of all. And so it is the duty of the just to defy dominance and to challenge control.

~ Robert Fanney

to Vaneigem and the Situationists who by shrewd use of collage and juxtaposition exposed both the poverty and richness of slogans, and the thinly veiled hypocrisy of a spectacular society which by not respecting words abuses people, and by insulting the intelligence creates a state of political cretinisation in which the many and various forms of authoritarian control dominate.

~ Alexis Lykiard

The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we're herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we're supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can't even piss when we have to. That's how we learn to be plastic and dumb.

~ Marge Piercy

Trying to be offensive for the sole purpose of being offensive should always deem one the least offensive of offenders.

~ Criss Jami

Entrepreneurs see the no diving sign and back-up to get a running start.

~ Ryan Lilly

And then it happens. Up and down the row, the victors begin to join hands. Some right away, like the morphlings, or Wiress and Beetee. Others unsure but caught up in the demands of those around them, like Brutus and Enobaria. By the time the anthem plays its final strains, all twenty-four of us stand in one unbroken line in what must be the first public show of unity among the districts since the Dark Days. You can see the realization of this as the screens begin to pop into blackness. It's too late, though. In the confusion they didn't cut us off in time. Everyone has seen.

~ Suzanne Collins

Man cannot be reduced to slavery if he is not distorted first. The politician and the priest have been in a deep conspiracy down the ages. They have been reducing humanity to a crowd of slaves. They are destroying every possibility of rebellion in man—and love is rebellion, because love listens only to the heart and does not care a bit about anything else.

~ Osho

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

Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.

~ Albert Camus

What's wrong with (Captain) Jack Aubrey?Everything, since he has a command and I have not.

~ Patrick O'brian

I swear it only hit me then, with full conscious force, who the real villains of this piece had been from start to finish…those lying, cancerous dogs of the mainstream media!

~ Paul Christensen

Being classy is my teenage rebellion.

~ Rebecca Mckinsey

Disrobe both conformity and rebellion to find true independence.

~ Khang Kijarro Nguyen

You can best serve civilization by being against what usually passes for it.

~ Wendell Berry

I asked Troit, ‘What was it about the gang leaders that made you want to be more like them?’Troit answered, ‘To be truthful, I used to feel good in their presence. I used to feel wanted in their presence. I used to feel appreciated in their presence. In their presence, you can sit down and talk and you can feel that they appreciate you. Troit Lynes, former death row inmate of Her Majesty Prison in The Bahamas

~ Drexel Deal

We are so rebellious that when we die our cells refuse to live a second longer. But our souls they live always....

~ Shawna Mae Lewis

I think the whole student rebellion is not really a rebellion at all....They want a certain kind of identity, they're jockeying with each other for political power in their own culture. The basis for this behavior is a desire for notoriety.

~ Truman Capote

When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” [Snyder] said, they were protesting the iron-grip bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture— the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.

~ Peter Coyote

Innocence was gone from all our acts. Our habitual state of rebellion became a serious political crime.

~ Anaïs Nin

Fallen man is both terrified of vulnerability and committed to maintaining independence.

~ Kay Warren

Americans were convinced in their own minds that they were very miserable, and those who think so are so. There is nothing so easy as to persuade people that they are badly governed. Take happy and comfortable people and talk to them with the art of the evil one, and they can soon be made discontented with their government, their rulers, with everything around them, and even with themselves.

~ Thomas Hutchinson

And you came back to Lyrian? Galloran said in disbelief.Believe it or not, I came through the same hippopotamus that brought me here the first time. Jumped into the tank on purpose. I wanted to keep others from wasting their time pursuing the Word. And I couldn't ditch Rachel.Galloran smiled. Truly, you are possessed by that species of madness that begets heroism.

~ Brandon Mull

Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was.

~ John Gaddis

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features, Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly. Oh we, who wished to lay for the foundations for peace and friendliness,Could never be friendly ourselves.

~ Bertolt Brecht

The greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules. It's people who follow orders that drop bombs and massacre villages.

~ Banksy

Time is a hard-hearted rebel, we cannot fight him or can we beg him to slow down, wait for us or stop, all we have to do is to obey his strict rules, follow him and run, he doesn't get tired, and we musn't get tired too.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

When I read a daring book or listen to rebellious music, I feel like I've found what freedom really means.

~ Carla H. Krueger

those who will defend authority against rebellion must not themselves rebel.

~ J.r.r. Tolkien

Maybe, generations ago, young people rebelled out of some clear motive, but now, we know we’re rebelling. Between teen movies and sex-ed textbooks we’re so ready for our rebellious phase we can’t help but feel it’s safe, contained. It will turn out all right, despite the risk, snug in the shell of rebellion narrative. Rebellion narrative, does that make sense? It was appropriate to do, so we did it.

~ Daniel Handler