Selected rebellion quotes

1. Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.

2. Analysis of rebellion leads at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of contemporary thought, a human nature does exist, as the Greeks believed. Why rebel if there is nothing permanent in oneself worth preserving? ... Rebellion, though apparently negative, since it creates nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the part of man which must always be defended.

3. Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.

4. Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.

5. All dese governments and dis this and that, these people that say they're here to help, why them say you cannot smoke the herb? Herb... herb is a plant, you know? And when me check it, me can't find no reason. All them say is, 'it make you rebel'. Against what?

6. The more people smoke herb, the more Babylon fall.

7. The objector and the rebel who raises his voice against what he believes to be the injustice of the present and the wrongs of the past is the one who hunches the world along.

8. Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.

9. We real cool. We Left school. We Lurk late. We Strike straight. We Sing sin. We Thin gin. We Jazz June. We Die soon.

10. To crave for happiness in this world is simply to be possessed by a spirit of revolt. What right have we to happiness?

11. A hero is someone who rebels or seems to rebel against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them. Obviously that can only work at moments. It can't be a lasting thing. That's not saying that people shouldn't keep trying to rebel against the facts of existence. Someday, who knows, we might conquer death, disease and war.

12. White collar conservative flashin' down the street, Pointing that plastic finger at me, Hoping soon my kind will drop and die, But I'm gonna wave my freak flag high.

13. Come! Let us lay a lance in rest, And tilt at windmills under a wild sky! For who would live so petty and unblest That dare not tilt at something ere he die; Rather than, screened by safe majority, Preserve his little life to little end, And never raise a rebel cry!

14. Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

15. Curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.

16. With rebellion, awareness is born.

17. This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty ... what you will.

18. I am the lizard king. I can do anything.

19. Mr. Bibbit, you might warn this Mr. Harding that I'm so crazy I admit to voting for Eisenhower. Bibbit! You tell Mr. McMurphy I'm so crazy I voted for Eisenhower twice! And you tell Mr. Harding right back - he puts both hands on the table and leans down, his voice getting low - that I'm so crazy I plan to vote for Eisenhower again this November.

20. He [George Washington Cable] has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it.

21. Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third - ['Treason!' cried the Speaker] - may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.

22. 'Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.'

23. I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.

24. Cut word lines - Cut music lines - Smash the control images - Smash the control machine - Burn the books - Kill the priests - Kill! Kill! Kill!

25. If it's illegal to rock and roll, throw my ass in jail!

26. Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that's a tough call. That's rebellion.

27. I never thought I was normal, never tried to be normal. Normal runs in that little rut down there. I don't know nothing about being normal. I've been in jail all my life, man. I lived on the handball court. This guy raised me up. All the men in the joint raised me up, told me what to do, what was right and wrong, told me where to sit down , where to stand up, I just did whatever I was told. You know, and I got to the end of it and I just turned around and said 'Wow, far out.'

28. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?

29. It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things which excites people to revolt.

30. If you're strong enough, there are no precedents.

31. It was pretty sad, because for the first time I found how stupid people could be. It sort of made me feel alone in the world. The more people pointed at me in scorn the more stubborn I got and when they began calling me the Bad Girl of West Seattle High, I tried to live up to it.

32. If I had observed all the rules, I'd never have gotten anywhere.

33. God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ... What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

34. I think for it to be unhip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me had some sense of hope in them.

35. June 16, 1971, mama gave birth to a Hell raising heavenly son.

36. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at liberty when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it.

37. The writer is a spiritual anarchist, as in the depth of his soul every man is. He is discontented with everything and everybody. The writer is everybody's best friend and only true enemy - the good and great enemy. He neither walks with the multitude nor cheers with them. The writer who is a writer is a rebel who never stops.

38. ... the task of youth is not only its own salvation but the salvation of those against whom it rebels, but in that case there must be something vital to rebel against and if the elderly stiffly refuse to put up a vigorous front of their own, it leaves the entire situation in a mist.

39. Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc

40. Now some guys they just give up living and start dying little by little piece by piece. Some guys come home from work and wash up And go racing in the streets. Tonight, tonight the strip's just right, I wanna blow 'em all out of their seats. We're callin' out around the world, we're going racin' in the street.

41. 'They say jump and you say how high, ya brain dead, you gotta fucking bullet in ya head!!!'

42. 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!'

43. 'More for Gore, or the son of a drug lord? None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord [from Guerilla Radio]'

44. Fuck your parliament and your constitution.

45. Break free, my soul, good manners are thy tomb!

46. Load up on guns, and bring your friends, it's fun to lose and to pretend, she's over-bored and self-assured, I know I know, a dirty word.

47. Kurt chewed bubblegum in his soul.

48. By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling against 'reality,' even when its limitations are clearly perceived, is always difficult. It means deciding things can be different and ought to be different; that your own perceptions are right and the experts and authorities wrong; that your discontent is legitimate and not merely evidence of selfishness, failure or refusal to grow up. Recognizing that 'reality' is not inevitable makes it more painful; subversive thoughts provoke the urge to subversive action. But such action has consequences - rebels risk losing their jobs, failing in school, incurring the wrath of parents and spouses, suffering social ostracism. Often vociferous conservatism is sheer defensiveness: People are afraid to be suckers, to get their hopes up, to rethink their hard-won adjustments, to be branded bad or crazy.

49. You don't know what I'm all about Like killing cops and reading Kerouac

50. I must make the important distinction between the rebel and the revolutionary. One is in ineradicable opposition to the other. The revolutionary seeks an external political change.... The origin of the term is the word revolve, literally meaning a turnover, as the revolution of a wheel. When the conditions under a given government are insufferable some groups may seek to break down that government in the conviction that any new form cannot but be better. Many revolutions, however, simply substitute one kind of government for another, the second no better than the first-which leaves the individual citizen, who has had to endure the inevitable anarchy between the two, worse off than before. Revolution may do more harm than good. The rebel ... seeks above all an internal change, a change in the attitudes, emotions, and outlook of the people to whom he is devoted. He often seems to be temperamentally unable to accept success and the ease it brings; he kicks against the pricks, and when one frontier is conquered, he soon becomes ill-at-ease and pushes on to the new frontier. He is drawn to the unquiet minds and spirits, for he shares their everlasting inability to accept stultifying control.

51. Gutter ways my mentality is ghetto/We're guerillas in this criminal war, we all rebels

52. Until I die, they label me as a ridah/Forever, my ni**az be together

53. I huffed and puffed about my curfew and broke the rules/Ran with the local crew, and had a smoke or two

54. I'm Ted Bell. And you go straight to the place where the Devil lives and has sex and makes little Devils.

55. Be lazy, go crazy.

56. Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth, follow only beauty, and obey only love.

57. If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.

58. If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual State. In a single State, if the persons entrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair.

59. There is a greatness in the lives of those who build up religious systems, a greatness in action, in idea and in self-subordination, embodied in instance after instance through centuries of growth. There is a greatness in the rebels who destroy such systems: they are the Titans who storm heaven, armed with passionate sincerity. It may be that the revolt is the mere assertion by youth of its right to its proper brilliance, to that final good of immediate joy. Philosophy may not neglect the multifariousness of the world - the fairies dance, and Christ is nailed to the cross.

60. The only reason I don't quit smoking is because I fear that if I did, I'd become one of you.

61. You are remembered for the rules you break.

62. Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

63. Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret, as well as the other. I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there, had not brought Heathcliff so low I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.

64. When a sixth of the population of a nation which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize. What makes this duty the more urgent is the fact that the country so overrun is not our own, but ours is the invading army.

65. You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!

66. Be a constant outrage to modesty There is nothing to fear: modesty is exercised only among the blind.

67. The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders.

68. There are men who live contented through they live without decorum. Others suffer as if in agony when they see around them people living without decorum. There must be a certain amount of decorum in the world, just as there must be a certain amount of light. When there are many men without decorum, there are always others who themselves possess the decorum of many men. These are the ones who rebel with terrible strength against those who rob nations of their liberty, which is to rob men of their decorum. Embodied in those men are thousands of men, a whole people, human dignity.

69. I want to perform an unnatural act.

70. They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom For trying to change the system from within I'm coming now, I'm coming to reward them First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

71. Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

72. Nobody tells me fuck all!

73. The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this problem by defying their elders and copying each other.

74. Fifteen men on the dead man's chest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil had done for the rest - Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

75. And the end of the fight is a tombstone white, with the name of the late deceased, And the epitaph drear: 'A fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.'

76. Wake up tired, Monday mornings suck, It's way too early to catch a bus, Why conform without a fuss, Daddy Daddy, no, I don't wanna go to school, woo!

77. 'I am the master of the middle finger!' (WM 21 Gladiator Commercial)

78. 'Badges? You got us badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges!' (To Kurt Angle)

79. My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.

80. Not a single Storm Trooper would have followed Rohm. The whole bogy was merely a revolt of leaders, and only quite a small group of the leaders were willing to take part.

81. I care very little for Salzburg and not at all for the archbishop: I shit on both of them.

82. Comedy is rebellion against that kind of piety which we may call the False Piety...against hypocrisy, against pretense, against falsehood and humbug and bunk and fraud, against false promises and base deceivers...against all evils masquerading as true and good and worthy of respect.

83. ...women and girls begin to bare themselves behind and in front, and there is nobody to punish and hold in check, and besides, God's word is mocked.

84. I'm just a Rock and Roll Rebel, I tell you no lies, they say I worship the devil, they must be stupid or blind

85. You wanna know more, more, more about me I'm the girl who's kicking the coke machine

86. 'The first thing I want be done is to get that piece of crap out of my ring! Don't just get him out of the ring, get him out of the WWF, because I've proven son, without a shadow of a doubt - you ain't got what it takes anymore. You sit there and you thump your bible and you say your prayers, and it didn't get you anywhere. Talk about you Psalms, talk about John 3:16... Austin 3:16 says: 'I've just whipped your ass'!! All he's gotta do is buy himself a cheap bottle of Thunderbird, and try to dig back some of that courage, he had in his prime. As the King of the Ring, I'm serving notice to every one of the WWF superstars. I don't give a damn what they are, they are all on the list, and that is Stone Cold's list, and I'm fixing to start running through all of them. As far as this championships match is considered, son, I don't give a damn, if it's Davey Boy Smith or Shawn Michaels. Steve Austin's time has come, and when I get the shot, you are looking at the next WWF champion, and that's the bottomline - cause Stone Cold said so!' (after defeating the Bible-quoting Jake Roberts in the 1996 King Of The Ring final)