Quotes About Rebellion

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

The mad can make their own laws.

Rock music in its lyrics often talks ahead of the time about what's going on in the country.

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it. (in a letter written while she was in college)

So up I got in anger, And took a book I had, And put a ribbon on my hair To please a passing lad. And, "One thing there's no getting by -- I've been a wicked girl," said I; But if I can't be sorry, why, I might as well be glad!

I know, but I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.

We like the taste of freedom ... because we like the smell of danger.

For myself I hold no preferences among flowers, so long as they are wild, free, spontaneous. Bricks to all greenhouses! Black thumb and cutworm to the potted plant!

Poor Hayduke: won all his arguments but lost his immortal soul.

I am against all forms of government, including good government.

For chrissake folks what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.

To the question: Wilderness, who needs it? Doc would say: Because we like the taste of freedom, comrades. Because we like the smell of danger. But, thought Hayduke, what about the smell of fear, Dad?

Grow a beard, take a bath, burn a billboard

You can never go wrong cuttin' fence,' repeated Smith, warming to his task. (Pling!) "Always cut fence. That's the law west of the 100th meridian. East of that don't matter none. Back there it's all lost anyhow. But west, we cut fence,' (Plang!)

Hayduke smelled something foul in all this. A smoldering bitterness warmed his heart and nerves; the slow fires of anger kept his cockles warm, his hackles rising. Hayduke burned. And he was not a patient man.

People who think that love, sex, marriage, work, play, life and death are serious matters are urged NOT to read this book. Buy it, yes, but don't read it. [Regarding "The Fool's Progress"]

A part of our nature rebels against this truth and against that other part which would accept it. A second truth of equal weight contradicts the first, proclaiming through art, religion, philosophy, science and even war that human life, in some way not easily definable, is significant and unique and supreme beyond all the limits of reason and nature. And this second truth we can deny only at the cost of denying our humanity.

Dr. Sarvis with his bald mottled dome and savage visage, grim and noble as Sibelius, was out night-riding on a routine neighborhood beautification project, burning billboards along the highway—U.S. 66

The Machine may seem omnipotent, but it is not. Human bodies and human wit, active here, there, everywhere, united in purpose, independent in action, can still face that machine and stop it and take it apart and reassemble it-if we wish-on lines entirely new. There is, after all, a better way to live.

Serious critics, serious librarians, serious associate professors of English will if they read this work dislike it intensely; at least I hope so.

I piss on you from a considerable height.

What are you in for, Rev'rend, anyway? Me, son? My body's here but the spirit's free as a bluebird. Okay, then why is your body here? Well now, the Judge he calls it assault. I done hit a man and he falls down. Didn't hit him hard but he falls down like a log. Maybe he wasn't standin very good.