John Edgar Wideman Quotes

I love challenging the status quo.

There comes not seldom a crisis in the life of men, of nations, and of worlds, when the old forms seem ready to decay, and the old rules of action have lost their binding force. The evils of existing systems obscure the blessings that attend them; and, where reform is needed, the cry is raised for subversion

Every threat to the status quo is an opportunity in disguise.

Embrace change. Envision what could be, challenge the status quo, and drive creative destruction.

Why not touch things that we hate and turn them upside down and inside out?

The main dangers in this life are the people who want to change everything... or nothing.

Ideas have unhinged the gates of empires.

I didn't run for mayor to be the caretaker of the status quo.

Comedy is to force us to observe ourselves in ways that are humorous and yet, at the end of the day, that cause us enough discomfort with the status quo to make a change.

I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it.

Insurrection of thought always precedes insurrection of arms.

As the generalization goes about the art industry, people can be really challenging and thought-provoking in their thinking and questioning the status quo, and it's really important that the status quo can be questioned and that there are people doing that.

Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.

If you want to really change something, do not try to fight the existing reality. create a new reality.

This is the age of disruption.

Steve Jobs would have wanted his words to change not just technology but politics itself.

The revision of any kind of established model is always a political act.

My goal isn't to be one of the best; it's to change the game, to change the way things work.

No, everything is not going to be okay. It never is. It isn't okay now. Change, by definition, changes things

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

The germ of creation lies in violence.

My wife, Amanda, is terribly good at warping reality. She is like a bowling ball on a rubber sheet, and you find yourself living in her universe, doing things that are completely unexpected or unimaginable for you, but you blink and you're up on a stage singing, or wearing a peculiar wig, or writing a book filled with feelings and emotion, or doing something equally as unlikely.

Thinking is always dangerous to the status quo. [...] The moment you start thinking, you'll want to change something.

If you look at anything long enough, say just that wall in front of you - it will come out of that wall.

The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word "crisis." One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity.