Vivienne Westwood Quotes

I love challenging the status quo.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law.

Heretics are the only bitter remedy against the entropy of human thought.

If your goal is to change the world, you can't start by doing things the same old way because it sells better.

What counts alone is the innovator, the dissenter, the harbinger of things unheard of, the man who rejects the traditional standards and aims at substituting new values and ideas for old ones.

All human advances occur in the outlaw area.

Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.

A key ingredient in innovation is the ability to challenge authority and break rules.

Leapfrog innovation - consistent, constant, ridiculous leapfrog innovation - only happens within a dictatorship. Any time you try to do something really innovative, most people aren't going to understand it until after they experience it. So when you're developing in innovation, you have to be a dictator.

Some of the most valuable stuff I do has to do with my dissenting from the general opinion about people in movements.

… 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.

I am interested in work that jumps boundaries, and that makes trouble. Part of me is comfortable with that: with being a bit of a troublemaker.

If people are telling you that they don't believe what you're doing, that means you're doing something out of their comfort zone. And generally, people don't want to be taken out of their comfort zone because it's outside of the status quo.

We must be alarmingly enterprising, and we must be startlingly original, and do new and striking things which constitute a revolution.

Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But 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.

All art is based on nonconformity ... Without nonconformity we would have had no Bill of Rights or Magna Carta, no public education system, no nation upon this continent, no continent, no science at all, no philosophy, and considerably fewer religions.

For, after all, in science one achieves the greatest impact (and often the greatest headlines) not by going along with the herd, but by bucking against it.

No great idea in its beginning can ever be within the law. How can it be within the law?

I have an almost complete disregard of precedent, and a faith in the possibility of something better. It irritates me to be told how things have always been done. I defy the tyranny of precedent. I go for anything new that might improve the past.

All progress has resulted from people who took unpopular positions.

Every new opinion, at its starting, is precisely in a minority of one.

I've always been controversial because I offer new ideas. For me to be controversial, I think this is positive.

Men like me are impossible until the day when they become necessary.

The Pre-Raphaelites, while very bothered by what the establishment thought of them, also utterly rebelled against it. In everything - social, sexual, emotional - they were out on a limb, pushing the boundaries.

We are reinventing the world. We've set the ball spinning with little concern for where and how it's going to stop.