Top 40 Reactionary Quotes

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there’s a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility.

Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary.

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.

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

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.

I don’t like a lot of what’s published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.

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.

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.’

When religious leaders get involved in elections, it is usually with a reactionary social agenda.

We oppose the reactionary policies of the U.S. government but we do not oppose the American people. We want to have many good friends in the United States.

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy’s day; I’d estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy – they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.

American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.

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.

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.

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.

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

Looking at myself retrospectively, how I survived, how I was reactionary as my surroundings were ever changing and I didn’t have time to make thought out choices. My growth was quick, forced and dynamic.

Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary.

True conservatives fear anything that is at odds with the status quo, even to the extent of being unable to recognise when the status quo represents injustice. And reactionary conservatives actually want to tear down the gains of the past.

Hip-hop belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s one of the most radical, revolutionary and reactionary music there is.

All adventure is now reactionary.

There’s no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I’ve happily joined in many discussions about ‘the contemporary novel’ where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

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.

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.

Men are born privileged in the scale of things – I’m generalizing, but it’s true. Women have to define themselves in the eyes of men. They have to fight for their rights, especially in a society that will pretend that there is no fight or no battle, that it’s a cliche, that feminists are reactionary, all these things.

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

The lack of trust in supranational entities and cosmopolitan elite creates a fertile ground for tribalist belongings and reactionary politics.

It didn’t take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years.

A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas.

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state – that devouring leviathan – will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can’t shake.

Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

I’m not a reactionary.

Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.

Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys.

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.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

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.

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.

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.