Top 55 Subversive Quotes

One of the things I love about the character development in ‘Power’ is Courtney A. Kemp’s subversive use of stereotype.

Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

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.

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.

Maybe in the world of BoJack, physical attraction is sort of different, beauty standards are different from our world because, why not? It’s just more fun to have a sexy chameleon or a blue-tongued skink or whatever. I don’t know how subversive that is, but it’s fun for me.

Communists love to make films about composers because composers compose music and don’t talk subversive things.

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’s kind of a subversive act to tell a story of a woman past a certain age, to develop a four-hour movie based on a marriage and a story of two people past middle age.

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.

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.

I do not believe that the hungry man should be treated as subversive for expressing his suffering.

I’m interested in genre in a way, I suppose because you have a framework of something and you can just twist it to explore the psychology or try different subversive ideas on something that feels familiar.

What feels most productive to me isn’t to think so much in terms of how I can be alternative, but how I can be subversive in a way that feels organic, how I can connect with people, and how I can just be myself, which may be the hardest thing to be.

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.

I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.

If you aren’t a reader and you have a kid with his face buried in books, it can be a bit threatening. My parents viewed my reading as somewhat effeminate, but also subversive on some level.

If I say most people are pretty decent that may sound nice and warm but actually it’s really radical and subversive and that’s why, all throughout history, those who have advocated a more hopeful view of human nature – often the anarchists – have been persecuted.

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.

My husband and I like to reminisce about how, when we were 9, we read straight through L. Frank Baum’s ‘Oz’ series, books filled with wizards and witches. And you know what those subversive tales taught us? That we loved to read!

Among so many things, ‘Time Passes’ has shown me subversive ways of portraying time, of looking away from the human to the far more terrifying, far more immense texture of time beneath the minute span of a human life.

‘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. It redefined what I thought you could do with a TV show.

Frankly, I think that’s something that black people in America have often done – finding ways under very, very difficult circumstances to be subversive, but also to push things forward. And I think that applies to music. I think it applies to dance. I think it applies to a number of things.

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.

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe was not engaged in subversive work; she was an apolitical project manager with the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of the Reuters news agency.

Those of us who live in Mumbai or Delhi have notions about what women who live in Bhopal, or smaller towns, are like; and that perception is wrong. Some people are scared by how complex and subversive these women’s lives can be.

I don’t see myself as subversive. I just don’t necessarily buy what people tell me initially.

I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she’d been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole.

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.

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

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.

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.

If I wanted to make a subversive record, it would be horrifying and insane.

‘The Beach’ novel, in my mind, was, in some respects, subversive.

My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.

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.

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.

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.

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

My designs are slightly subversive in their way; it can be in the cut or the colour, but they’re always obtainable: they’re not so difficult that a 40-year-old woman wanting to go to a cocktail party looking foxy and a little bit different in something well-made would be alienated by them.

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.

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.

She doesn’t do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen’s point – Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.

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.

When a good idea sparks, it’s usually because of some subversive angle that means the song we’re writing will be fresh.

I wish that there were more games having the courage to talk about more subversive topics. Talking about politics, sexuality, human relationships.

Although it is hard to see why any sensible authority would feel threatened by the peaceful expression of one’s point of view, there is a long history of trying to repress subversive depictions of political figures – back in the 19th century, for example, France’s King Louis Philippe was depicted as a piece of fruit.

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.

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.