Quotes About Rebellion

Don't you contradict me!' Mrs Dubose bawled. 'And you -' she pointed an arthritic finger at me - 'what are you doing in those overalls? You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady! You'll grow up waiting on tables if somebody doesn't change your ways - a Finch waiting on tables at the O.K. Cafe - hah!

He declined to let us take our air rifles to the Landing (I had already begun to think of shooting Francis)

I was bored, so I began a letter to Dill. Miss Caroline caught me writing and told me to tell my father to stop teaching me. "Besides," she said. "We don't write in the first grade, we print. You won't learn to write until you're in the third grade.

Miss Caroline told me to tell my father not to teach me any more, it would interfere with my reading.

Skop screamed when they all looked at him, shouted it was all a trick, and had to be clubbed unconscious when he attacked the bowmen. Understanding had come to Pyrrus.

Snorting with disgust, Meta stamped out.

If you can't vote them—shoot them.

Try telling that to two-thirds of the governments that now exist, since that's about how many were founded by revolution. Nice, liberal democratic governments—that were started by a bunch of lads with guns and the immense desire to run things in a manner more beneficial to themselves. How else do you get rid of the powers on your neck if there is no way to legally vote them away? If you can't vote them—shoot them.

I've always done whatever I felt like doing in life. People may try to stop me, and convince me I'm wrong, but I won't change.

People whose freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody.

No matter how quiet and conformist a person's life seems, there's always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.

A girl doesn't always want to go out, you know, Mr. Wind-Up Bird. Sometimes she feels like being nasty--like, if the guy's gonna wait, let him really wait.

I don't give a damn about what people say. They can be reptile food for all I care.

When I thought of how I'd been living, how I'd been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea).

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

I saw that she was crying. Before I knew it, I was kissing her. Others on the platform were staring at us, but I didn't care about such things anymore. We were alive, she and I. And all we had to think about was continuing to live.

It was spring break, so the theater was always packed with high schools students. It was an animal house. I wanted to burn the place down.

Although I didn't think so at the time, things were a lot simpler in 1969. All you had to do to express yourself was throw rocks at riot police. But with today's sophistication, who's in a position to throw rocks? Who's going to brave what tear gas? C'mon, that's the way it is. Everything is rigged, tied into that massive capital web, and beyond this web there's another web. Nobody's going anywhere. You throw a rock and it'll come right back at you.

It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.

These guys are fakes. All they've got on their minds is impressing the new girls with the big words they're so proud of, while sticking their hanse up their skirts. And when they graduate,they cut their hair short and march off to work for Mitsubishi or IBM or Fuji Bank. They marry pretty wives who've never read Marx and have kids they give fancy names to that are enough to make you puke. Smash what educational-industrial complex? Don't make me laugh!

Like most novelists, I like to do exactly the opposite of what I'm told. It's in my nature as a novelist. Novelists can't trust anything they haven't seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands. (Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech, JERUSALEM POST, Feb. 15, 2009)

Most of these university types are total phonies. They're scared to death somebody's gonna find they don't know something. They all read the same books and they all throw around the same words, and they get off listening to John Coltrane and seeing Pasolini movies. You call that 'revolution'? That does it for me, then. I'm not going to believe in any damned revolution. Love is all I'm going to believe in.

He found it increasingly difficult to accept the strict codes of the sect that clashed with ordinary values.

Where Watanabe and I are alike is we don't give a damn if nobody understands us… That's what makes us different from everybody else. They're all worried about whether the people around them understand them. But not me, and not Watanabe. We just don't give a damn. Self and others are separate.