Quotes About Rebellion

This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order.

It is important that we understand Bacon's Rebellion for what it revealed: the most promising land was never equally available to all.

Anne Hutchinson was excommunicated from the Boston congregation and expelled from the Bay Colony in 1638 for refusing to bend to the authority of the town fathers.

One of the first things Vincent explained to Norma was that there was a certain freedom of language in the Village that mustn't shock her. It wasn't vulgar. 'So we sat darning socks on Waverly Place and practiced the use of profanity as we stitched. Needle in, shit. Needle out, piss. Needle in, fuck. Needle out, cunt. Until we were easy with the words.

Tea no more! Down with bustles!

I hope instead she rages!

Conform, go crazy, or become an artist.

If any decent woman's calling consisted of taking her proper place in society (husband and house, plus voice lessons and a piano in the drawing-room), then this particular woman-to-be prefers to remain indecent.

When the people change, the palace cannot hold.

If the world didn't need shaking up, why would this power have come alive now?

Perhaps she did not die," said Halla, "perhaps her nurse turned into a bear and carried her away into the forest. Perhaps she was brought up by bears and dragons. Perhaps it was better for her in the end than being a king's child." "That was never the story," said Modolf. "Forget the story," said Halla.

I was a glaring blot on the perfection. But I didn't care: I didn't feel I owed him beauty.

READER, I RAN the fuck away.

Sorry, Mom, I've got a new phrase. When you can't rise above, sink below—and drag them all down with you. "I'm really sorry, ma'am," I say, amping up the sincerity in my voice. "It's just that your personality is so flat and lifeless, I mistook you for the table.

You said I had two choices. You were wrong. I went with Option 3: burn it all to the fucking ground.

Damn sugar, damn coffee, damn colonies!

Few understand that procrastination is our natural defense, letting things take care of themselves and exercise their antifragility; it results from some ecological or naturalistic wisdom, and is not always bad -- at an existential level, it is my body rebelling against its entrapment. It is my soul fighting the Procrustean bed of modernity.

'Twas my object to carry terror and destruction wherever we went.

I've done a lot of partying in my time because I didn't want to go home and I didn't know what to do.

I don't care, I don't care, I don't care what they think.

In the king's bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep.

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me.

I was frightened by the optimism of adults, their stupid trust in science to treat a troubled heart. Afraid of their obsession with believing they have to treat troubled kids. I just wanted them to leave me alone, so how come they didn't get it? But that's the way it always is.