Mark Twain Quotes

In America few people will trust you unless you are irreverent.

She was already learning that if you ignore the rules people will, half the time, quietly rewrite them so that they don't apply to you.

People are much too solemn about things - I'm all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.

I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.

I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.

I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

He's no kind of gentleman. That's all right. I'm no kind of lady.

My father's a Southern Baptist minister. I wasn't lighting cars on fire; I just wasn't.

I'm content to stand on tradition. I'm even more content to wipe my feet on it.

You're not allowed to be an eccentric in the world, you have to fit it.

Transgressive to me means breaking the rules and sinning. I don't see myself as breaking the rules and sinning. I'm really interested in what it means to be female.

Other people will call me a rebel, but I just feel like I'm living my life and doing what I want to do. Sometimes people call that rebellion, especially when you're a woman.

I'd rather laugh with the sinners than cry with the saints - the sinners are much more fun.

There's an expression in Persian, 'to play with the lion's tail.' I wasn't what Iranian society wanted me to be - a good girl. I played with the lion's tail.

No, I'm not politically correct. I never wanted to be, and I never will be.

To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us.

Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.

Irreverence is an essential part of our culture.

To me, in life, if there's, like, a rule, and I think it's ridiculous, then of course I'll circumvent that but also point out how ridiculous the rule is. Other than that, if I go to a concert, and my seat is Row G, Seat 12, I'm sitting in Row G, Seat 12. I don't care if I'm with five other friends, I'm supposed to be in Seat 12, that's my seat.

People don't know how to be outrageous anymore.

I've always been like, if society's trying to push me in one direction, I always rebel against it, thinking, 'Nope, I'm going to do the opposite, something that is not expected.'