Quotes About Defiance

One's dignity may be assaulted, vandalized and cruelly mocked, but cannot be taken away unless it is surrendered.

When people keep telling you that you can't do a thing, you kind of like to try it.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

If you can't beat them, arrange to have them beaten.

Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds.

Whatever success I've achieved has come from pretty much doing the opposite of what I've been told or expected to do.

You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies. You may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust, I'll rise.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings. And I did it out of spite.

there is no nation but the French that can smile even in the face of grim Death himself.

If they do not bring peace, we shall give them death.

Ah!, caballero —respondió Caderousse—, no se puede consolar al que no quiere ser consolado, y

I never seek to protect a society which does not protect me, and which I will even say, generally occupies itself about me only to injure me;

Ah,' said I, after four hours' work, 'since we are sinking, let us sink; we can die but once.

Not before I have killed you, poltroon! cried d'Artagnan, making the best face possible, and

déboutonna violemment sa redingote

Two methods of self-destruction were at his disposal. He could hang himself with his handkerchief to the window bars, or refuse food and die of starvation. But the first was repugnant to him. Dantes had always entertained the greatest horror of pirates, who are hung up to the yard-arm; he would not die by what seemed an infamous death.

I say what I please, and at this moment it pleases me to tell you that you annoy me. Aramis! Porthos!

Don't you ever run away?' 'Never. Escape is for cripples. Neurotics.

He was dead. He knew he was dead. He refused to submit to eternity. He beat again into the unknown.

I knew I must do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

I would rather hurt myself than be hurt by someone else, and so I took up this practice with a sense of purpose and without remorse.

odds don't matter. The natural world defies statistics.

Some people can't be warned away from disaster, you can try, you can put up every alert, but they'll still go their own way.