Subversive Quotes

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

The function of literature, through all its mutations, has been to make us aware of the particularity of selves, and the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture. Literature is in that sense subversive.

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.

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.

The thing that makes a great genre movie is one that's not just entertainment, not just horror or sci-fi or whatever. The ones I love are the genre pictures with some subversive message underlying it all.

Granted, there are times when, for business reasons, you do something that's more mainstream. But even then, I try to find something that has a dark or subversive aspect.

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.

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.

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

The real breeders of discontent and alien doctrines of government and philosophies subversive of good citizenship are such as these who take the law into their own hands.

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.

Writing, I'm convinced, should be a subversive activity - frowned on by the authorities - and not one cooed over and praised beyond common sense by some teacher.

It has now become the doctrine of a large clan of politicians that political honesty is unnecessary, slow, subversive of a man's interests, and incompatible with quick onward movement.

Sometimes people get mad at The Simpsons' subversive story telling, but there's another message in there, which is a celebration of making wild, funny stories.

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.

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.

I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.

The notion that Congress can change the meaning given a constitutional provision by the Court is subversive of the function of judicial review; and it is not the less so because the Court promises to allow it only when the Constitution is moved to the left.

I've never been a popular person, but it doesn't matter. I have everything in my life that I want. I'm not a walking publicity stunt. I'm not an anarchist, or bitter. I'm not trying to be subversive. I just try to remain unguarded, unprotected by fear, and agents and publicists, and I feel comfortable that way.

The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

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.

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.

U.S. journalists I don't think are very courageous. They tend to go along with the government's policy domestically and internationally. To question is seen as being unpatriotic, or potentially subversive.

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.

This is a good time to ask apologists for the Islamic regime, who degrades Islam? Who imposes stoning, forced marriage of underage girls and flogging for not wearing the veil? Do such practices represent Iran's ancient history and culture, its ethnic and religious diversity? Its centuries of sensual and subversive poetry?