Leo McCarey Quotes

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

I think, for a long time, people just did not know what to do with me. I looked like a Barbie doll, and then I had this voice like I spend my life in a bar, and I said things that were alarming and had ideas that didn't make sense.

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

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.'

I was a troubled young kid, and I would try to break every rule.

The only way to rebel against my mother was to be totally normal.

Insubordination may only be the evidence of a strong mind.

I wouldn't say I'm a rebel, but I do like pushing the limits sometimes.

If people say, 'You can't do that,' you can be sure I will do my utmost to do it.

I was a troublemaker.

I swim against the tide because I like to annoy.

People think I'm being stupid or false humble. It's not. I don't think I always fit in. Maybe it's a complex you get as someone who has always been fighting on the outside.

The best way to behave is to misbehave.

Disobedience happens not when we think too much grace but when we think too little of it

It was as if he grew his hair long and smoked cigarettes because he liked to, not because he liked being seen to. This was dangerously subversive.

The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the world. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out of the mass of meaningless data in the world an order and a form.

Disobedience, the rarest and most courageous of the virtues, is seldom distinguished from neglect, the laziest and commonest of the vices.

I had run away from home three times. I had been kicked out of three different schools under different circumstances. I was kicked out of everything that I didn't quit. Kicked out of schools. Kicked out of summer camp, the Boy Scouts, the altar boys, the choir, and something else that I can't think of, that I'm proud of. Anyway, that was my pattern. I just began to invent myself early in life, and went out and did something about it.

For ever and anon the soul becomes weary of the conventions that are not of it, and with a single stroke shatters the civilized lies with which it is unable to cope, and the strong arm reaches out and takes by force what it cannot win by cunning.

Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.

The key of joy is disobedience.

I'll be as dirty as I please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty!

Let must or if be damned with whomever's afraid down with ought with because with every brain which thinks it thinks, nor dares to feel.

Break windows, smoke cigars, and stay up late. Tell 'em to do that, they'll find a little pot of gold.