Subversive Ideas Quotes

All great truths begin as blasphemies.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

Political correctness may make for smooth edges, but it does little for the imagination and nothing for the arts. Writers work best when they are exploring at the outer limits of what is traditional, acceptable, or conventional.

I wish to propose for the reader's favorable consideration a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is this: that it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.

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

Even if we imagine I'm a Kremlin project, then I'm a good Kremlin project because I'm saying out things that have not been said before.

Ideas can threaten people. Be careful who you put them in front of.

Charlie Chaplin, too, through spectacle, contraband certain ideas, put them through, ideas that even today are not being expressed by great statesmen and politicians.

I love radical theorists. But at the same time, I don't agree with them a lot, but I love their theories. I love how they intellectualize rage, and this inner battle that such a tiny percent of people really care about. I find that the most interesting.

I've been surprised by how little criticism I've got. Harry Potter's been taking all the flak. I'm a great fan of J.K. Rowling, but the people - mainly from America's Bible Belt - who complain that Harry Potter promotes Satanism or witchcraft obviously haven't got enough in their lives. Meanwhile, I've been flying under the radar, saying things that are far more subversive than anything poor old Harry has said. My books are about killing God.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

In fiction, we are not bound by social convention, so the things that mystify and unsettle are allowed to rise to the surface.

Yes, I am mad - like the Marquis de Sade was mad, like Giordano Bruno was mad, like Antonin Artaud was mad.

Most of the great works of juvenile literature are subversive in one way or another: they express ideas and emotions not generally approved of or even recognized at the time; they make fun of honored figures and piously held beliefs; and they view social pretenses with clear-eyed directness, remarking - as in Andersen's famous tale - that the emperor has no clothes.

The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.

Is your washroom breeding Bolsheviks?

… there must be free play for so-called subversive ideas - every idea subverts the old to make way for the new. To shut off subversion is to shut off peaceful progress and to invite revolution and war.

The conquest of cultural power comes before political power and this is achieved through the concerted action of intellectual ‘organic’ call-outs. Infiltrated into all of the communication, expression, and academic media.

Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend most all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Normal science often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments.

Cripes Miss Wilcox, they're not guns,' I said. No, they're not Mattie, they're books. And a hundred times more dangerous.

There will always be an underground.

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

Situationism is a ludicrous proposition. It's ill-formed and it's perfectly French. That Gallic disposition towards common sense. L'Anarchie!

Few things in life seem more sexy than a banned book.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.