Lauren Groff Quotes

History pays more attention to reformers than others. We pay more attention to dissenters too.

Sometimes - history needs a push.

In the political, the social, the economic, even the cultural sphere, the revolutions of our time have been revolutions "against" rather than revolutions "for"... On the whole throughout this period the man--or party--that stood for doing the positive has usually cut a pathetic figure; well meaning but ineffectual, civilized but unrealistic, he was suspect alike to (by both) the ultras of destruction and the ultras of preservation and restoration.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

Don't accept the old order. Get rid of it.

Reformation ends not in contemplation, but in action.

Agitate! Agitate! Ought to be the motto of every reformer. Agitation is the opposite of stagnation - the one is life, the other death.

The social revolution of the nineteenth century can not draw its poetry from the past, it can draw that only from the future.

I do not fear … rupture—rupture with habits of thought, with ideas, with behaviors of the past that have prevented us from advancing, from grasping the future between our two arms … I want a rupture with conformity … with half heartedness … with conservatism … with immobility. This rupture I believe necessary. This rupture I have betrothed myself to. This rupture the French people have approved. This rupture I will perform.

… all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists. If there had been no trouble-makers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.

We are out to rebuild the world.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

Change is the raw material of history.

(Punk rock is) lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.

It's a brave new world.

When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward - or go back. He who now talks about the 'freedom of the press' goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism.

We have always held to the hope, the belief, the conviction that there is a better life, a better world, beyond the horizon.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

I love challenging the status quo.

'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.

We are here to make another world.

Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.