Global Language and World Culture
Rebellious Quotations (Part 1)

Rebellious Quotations (Part 1)

rebellious and revolutionary quotes or aphorisms
rebellious and revolutionary quotes or aphorisms

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
Albert Camus

I realized early on that the academy and the literary world alike — and I don’t think there really is a distinction between the two — are always dominated by fools, knaves, charlatans and bureaucrats. And that being the case, any human being, male or female, of whatever status, who has a voice of her or his own, is not going to be liked.
Harold Bloom

We are for aiding our allies by sharing some of our material blessings with those nations which share in our fundamental beliefs, but we are against doling out money government to government, creating bureaucracy, if not socialism, all over the world. We set out to help 19 countries. We are helping 107 We spent $146 billion. With that money, we bought a 2-million-dollar yacht for Haile Selassie. We bought dress suits for Greek undertakers, extra wives for Kenya government officials. We bought a thousand TV sets for a place where they have no electricity.
Ronald Reagan

The consistent anarchist should be a socialist, but a socialist of a particular sort. He will not only oppose alienated and specialized labor and look forward to the appropriation of capital by the whole body of workers, but he will also insist that this appropriation be direct, not exercised by some elite force acting in the name of the proletariat. Some sort of council communism is the natural form of revolutionary socialism in an industrial society. It reflects the intuitive understanding that democracy is largely a sham when the industrial system is controlled by any form of autocratic elite, whether of owners, managers, and technocrats, a ”vanguard” party, or a State bureaucracy.
Noam Chomsky

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality. The truth is, that a skilled bureaucracy is, though it boasts of an appearance of science, quite inconsistent with the true principles of the art of business.
Walter Bagehot

When by chance I happen to read some poor writings of people who believe they are writers, just because they put some words together, I cannot but think our stupid world nothing more than a shit ball lost in the universe!
Carl William Brown

The deviant that does not observe the trivial uses of the language is a poet, a deviant who violates the banal customs of society is a criminal.
Carl William Brown

A murderer is nothing but an enzyme. In the end he does nothing but catalyze an inevitable process. As a good precursor, in fact, he anticipates it.
Carl William Brown

The poor should learn what has always been the motto of the rich: “What’s mine is mine and what is yours if I can I steal it.
Carl William Brown

A bureaucrat is a Democrat who holds some office a Republican wants.
Alben W. Barkley

A bureaucrat is a person who cuts red tape sideways.
J. Mccabe

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is inefficiency. An efficient bureaucracy is the greatest threat to liberty.

Eugene J. Mccarthy

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Mary Mccarthy

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.
John Stuart Mill

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.
P. J. O’Rourke

No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth!
Ronald Reagan

If you’re going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy; God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won t.
Hyman G. Rickover

Bureaucracy is not an obstacle to democracy but an inevitable complement to it.
Joseph A. Schumpeter

Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from molasses.
Source Unknown

There is something about a bureaucrat that does not like a poem.
Gore Vidal

Reasonable orders are easy enough to obey; it is capricious, bureaucratic or plain idiotic demands that form the habit of discipline.
Barbara Tuchman

We found that the most exciting environments, that treated people very well, are also tough as nails. There is no bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo… excellent companies provide two things simultaneously: tough environments and very supportive environments.
Thomas J. Peters

In the 1960s we were fighting to be recognized as equals in the marketplace, in marriage, in education and on the playing field. It was a very exciting, rebellious time.
Marlo Thomas

In the relations of a weak Government and a rebellious people there comes a time when every act of the authorities exasperates the masses, and every refusal to act excites their contempt.
John Reed

Many nations are like rebellious teenagers who try to figure out just how many times they can kick us in the teeth while still taking our money.
Paul Weyrich

My characters are driven by a passionate desire for justice. They are rebellious and incorruptible.
Tahar Ben Jelloun

Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child.
Suzanne Farrell

Should doubt knock at your doorway, just say to those skeptical, disturbing, rebellious thoughts, I propose to stay with my faith, with the faith of my people.
Thomas S. Monson

Sons have always a rebellious wish to be disillusioned by that which charmed their fathers.
Aldous Huxley

The future will be the child of the past and the present, even if a rebellious child.
George Crumb

We were the rebels of the music industry so we wanted to write a rebellious song.
Brian Harvey

Whatever happened to the tomboy I used to be, the slightly rebellious rocker?
Brenda Lee

Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
Samuel Adams

He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country. There is seldom an instance of a man guilty of betraying his country, who had not before lost the feeling of moral obligations in his private connections.
Samuel Adams

How strangely will the Tools of a Tyrant pervert the plain Meaning of Words!
Samuel Adams

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.
Samuel Adams

It does not take a majority to prevail… but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men.
Samuel Adams

Mankind are governed more by their feelings than by reason.
Samuel Adams

Our contest is not only whether we ourselves shall be free, but whether there shall be left to mankind an asylum on earth for civil and religious liberty.
Samuel Adams

The Constitution shall never be construed… to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.
Samuel Adams

The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending against all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
Samuel Adams

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on Earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but only to have the law of nature for his rule.
Samuel Adams

We cannot make events. Our business is wisely to improve them.
Samuel Adams

The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
John Berger

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.
Honore De Balzac

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw

The difference between management and administration(which is what the bureaucrats used to do exclusively) is the difference between choice and rigidity.
Robert Heller

Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, ”What will you have, sir?” And I said, ”A glass of hemlock.”
Ernest Hemingway

There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Elliot Richardson

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.
Walter Lippmann

More and more, revolution has found itself delivered into the hands of its bureaucrats and doctrinaires on the one hand, and to the enfeebled and bewildered masses on the other.
Albert Camus

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

The language of the younger generation has the brutality of the city and an assertion of threatening power at hand, not to come. It is military, theatrical, and at its most coherent probably a lasting repudiation of empty courtesy and bureaucratic euphemism.
Elizabeth Hardwick

Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shootings of hostages, etc.
Rosa Luxemburg

A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy.
Aldous Huxley

Martyrdom is the only way a man can become famous without ability.
George Bernard Shaw

Man can climb to the highest summits, but he cannot dwell there long.
George Bernard Shaw

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.
George Bernard Shaw

I’m not a teacher: only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead — ahead of myself as well as you.
George Bernard Shaw

We hate those who will not take our advice, and despise them who do.
Henry Wheeler Shaw

If you value a man’s regard, strive with him. As to liking, you like your newspaper — and despise it.
George Bernard Shaw

Every man over forty is a scoundrel.
George Bernard Shaw

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.
George Bernard Shaw

I’m only a beer teetotaler, not a champagne teetotaler.
George Bernard Shaw

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.
George Bernard Shaw

The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbor to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.
George Bernard Shaw

Englishmen hate Liberty and Equality too much to understand them. But every Englishman loves a pedigree.
George Bernard Shaw

In Heaven an angel is nobody in particular.
George Bernard Shaw

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.
George Bernard Shaw

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
George Bernard Shaw

No one can contemplate the present condition of the masses of the people without desiring something like a revolution for the better.
Sir Robert Giffen

A revolutionist is one who desires to discard the existing social order and try another.
George Bernard Shaw

No doubt it is easy to demostrate that property will destroy society unless society destroys it.
George Bernard Shaw

What is really important in Man is the part of him that we do not understand. Of much of it we are not even conscious, just as we are not normally conscious of keeping up our circulation by our heart-pump, though if we neglect it we die.
George Bernard Shaw

The politician who once had to learn how to flatter Kings has now to learn how to fascinate, amuse, coax, humbug, frighten, or otherwise strike the fancy of the electorate.
George Bernard Shaw

No community has ever yet passed beyond the initial phases in which its pugnacity and fanaticism enabled it to found a nation, and its cupidity to establish and develop a commercial civilization.
George Bernard Shaw

Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same.
George Bernard Shaw

The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters.
George Bernard Shaw

Kings are not born: they are made by artificial hallucination.
George Bernard Shaw

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.
George Bernard Shaw

Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
George Bernard Shaw

A fool’s brain digest philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
George Bernard Shaw

The vilest abortionist is he who attempts to mould a child’s character.
George Bernard Shaw

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.
George Bernard Shaw

A learned man is an idler who kills time with study. Beware of his false knowledge: it is more dangerous than ignorance.
George Bernard Shaw

Every fool believes what his teachers tell him, and calls his credulity science or morality as confidently as his father called it divine revelation.
George Bernard Shaw

No man can be a pure specialist without being in the strict sense an idiot.
George Bernard Shaw

Assasination on the scaffold is the worst form of assasination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
George Bernard Shaw

Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
George Bernard Shaw

When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
George Bernard Shaw

Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
George Bernard Shaw

Titles distinguish the mediocre, embarass the superior, and are disgraced by the inferior.
George Bernard Shaw

Property, said Proudhon, is theft. This is the only perfect truism that has been uttered on the subject.
George Bernard Shaw

Man is the only animal which esteems itself rich in proportion to the number and voracity of its parasites.
George Bernard Shaw

Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
George Bernard Shaw

Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty.
George Bernard Shaw

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.
George Bernard Shaw

In an ugly and unhappy world the richest man can purchase nothing but ugliness and unhappiness.
George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
George Bernard Shaw

Civilization is a disease produced by the practice of building societies with rotten material.
George Bernard Shaw

Gambling promises the poor what Property performs for the rich: that is why the bishops dare not denounce it fundamentally.
George Bernard Shaw

Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty: what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
George Bernard Shaw

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.
George Bernard Shaw

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.
George Bernard Shaw

I’m an atheist and I thank God for it.
George Bernard Shaw

I would be married, but I’d have no wife, I would be married to a single life.
Richard Crashaw

In a battle all you need to make you fight is a little hot blood and the knowledge that it’s more dangerous to lose than to win.
George Bernard Shaw

Beauty is all very well at first sight; but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house three days?
George Bernard Shaw

In your Salvation shelter I saw poverty, misery, cold and hunger. You gave them bread and treacle and dreams of heaven. I give from thirty shillings a week to twelve thousand a year. They find their own dreams; but I look after the drainage.
George Bernard Shaw

Don’t order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don’t know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond.
George Bernard Shaw

You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out.
George Bernard Shaw

How can you dare teach a man to read until you’ve taught him everything else first?
George Bernard Shaw

Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books nobody reads.
George Bernard Shaw

When you’ve got something to prove, there’s nothing greater than a challenge.
Terry Bradshaw

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
George Bernard Shaw

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

People do no change with the times, they change the times.
P.K. Shaw

Children are curious and are risk takers. They have lots of courage. They venture out into a world that is immense and dangerous. A child initially trusts life and the processes of life.
John Bradshaw

The early Christian rules of life were not made to last, because the early Christians did not believe that the world itself was going to last.
George Bernard Shaw

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say ”I know” instead of ”I am learning,” and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.
George Bernard Shaw

We sing in a church, why can we not dance there?
George Bernard Shaw

People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can’t find them, make them.
George Bernard Shaw

Find enough clever things to say, and you’re a Prime Minister; write them down and you’re a Shakespeare.
George Bernard Shaw

Common Sense is instinct, and enough of it is genius.
Henry Wheeler Shaw

The wheel that squeaks the loudest is the one that gets the grease.
Henry Wheeler Shaw

What’s the worst thing that can happen to a quarterback? He loses his confidence.
Terry Bradshaw

Nothing is worth doing unless the consequences may be serious.
George Bernard Shaw

The American Constitution, one of the few modern political documents drawn up by men who were forced by the sternest circumstances to think out what they really had to face, instead of chopping logic in a university classroom.
George Bernard Shaw

How can what an Englishman believes be hearsay? It is a contradiction in terms.
George Bernard Shaw

I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes the illness worth while.
George Bernard Shaw

She has lost the art of conversation, but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.
George Bernard Shaw

The great danger of conversion in all ages has been that when the religion of the high mind is offered to the lower mind, the lower mind, feeling its fascination without understanding it, and being incapable of rising to it, drags it down to its level by degrading it.
George Bernard Shaw

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.
George Bernard Shaw

I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people.
George Bernard Shaw

Man gives every reason for his conduct save one, every excuse for his crimes save one, every plea for his safety save one; and that one is his cowardice.
George Bernard Shaw

No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.
George Bernard Shaw

Man was created a little lower than the angels and has bin getting a little lower ever since.
Henry Wheeler Shaw

The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality.
George Bernard Shaw

I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
George Bernard Shaw

And I communed with many different faiths and even when I wanted to be rebellious I never did not believe in Him. I never believed the people who said God was destructive or punishing.
Alfre Woodard

And I think that’s why I was going to be a musician. I was very rebellious. And I didn’t want to be an actor. My father used to say to me you should be an actor if you want to be in the arts.
Katey Sagal

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
Tom Robbins

I do think I have a rebellious, metal-loving rock chick inside of me.
Kesha

I have a bit of a rebellious nature.
John Cusack

I was raised by the Christian Brothers, who believe in that, fortunately. They were, to me, the most rebellious arm of the Catholic Church – and one of the most liberal and forward thinking.
Paul Kantner

I was rebellious.
Adrian Grenier

I went through a period of great rebellion within my family, when I was about 9 or 10. I was mad, I had no focus, had no real interest in anything, and so I started to do things that were just rebellious and stupid.
Kevin Spacey

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.
Charles Baudelaire

The successful revolutionary is a statesman, the unsuccessful one a criminal.
Erich Fromm

All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum.
John Kenneth Galbraith

A revolution does not last more than fifteen years, the period which coincides with the flourishing of a generation.
Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The main object of a revolution is the liberation of man… not the interpretation and application of some transcendental ideology.
Jean Genet

A great revolution is never the fault of the people, but of the government.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The surest guide to the correctness of the path that women take is joy in the struggle. Revolution is the festival of the oppressed.
Germaine Greer

The children of the revolution are always ungrateful, and the revolution must be grateful that it is so.
Ursula K. Le Guin

The spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty.
François
Pierre Guillaume) Guizot

True revolutionaries are like God — they create the world in their own image. Our awesome responsibility to ourselves, to our children, and to the future is to create ourselves in the image of goodness, because the future depends on the nobility of our imaginings.
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

Whether a revolutions succeeds or fails people of great hearts will always be sacrificed to it.
Heinrich Heine

The main effect of a real revolution is perhaps that it sweeps away those who do not know how to wish, and brings to the front men with insatiable appetites for action, power and all that the world has to offer.
Eric Hoffer

We used to think that revolutions are the cause of change. Actually it is the other way around: change prepares the ground for revolution.
Eric Hoffer

I was probably the only revolutionary referred to as cute.
Abbie Hoffman

Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles.
Oliver Wendell Holmes

The brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over we realize this: that the human race has been roughly handled, but that it has advanced.
Victor Hugo

If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions of the human mind.
Karl Wilhelm Von Humboldt

History teaches us that the great revolutions aren’t started by people who are utterly down and out, without hope and vision. They take place when people begin to live a little better — and when they see how much yet remains to be achieved.
Hubert H. Humphrey

Revolutions are notorious for allowing even non-participants — even women! — new scope for telling the truth since they are themselves such massive moments of truth, moments of such massive participation.
Selma James

Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy.
Franz Kafka

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy

Revolutions are not made for export.
Nikita Khrushchev

Rebellious Quotations (2)

Quotes by authors

Quotes by arguments