Quotes About Reactionaries

Public schoolboys are not merely conservatives, they are by nature totalitarian reactionaries.

For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.

Like other revolutionaries I can thank God for the reactionaries. They clarify the issue.

The only reactionaries are those who find themselves at home in the present.

America has always accomplished far more acting as courageous frontiersmen than weak reactionaries.

If the noble and the sacred cannot find serious expression in democracy, its choiceworthiness becomes questionable. These are the arguments, the special pleading of the reactionaries, the disinherited of the ancien rgime.

The class nature of the imperialists and reactionaries makes them antagonistic to the masses of the people. Accordingly they are afraid of the word people itself. Frequently using, the word nation, they try to cover the class confrontation and conflict of capitalist society.

All the experience the Chinese people have accumulated through several decades teaches us to enforce the people's democratic dictatorship, that is, to deprive the reactionaries of the right to speak and let the people alone have that right.

Look at the John Birch Society. Look at Hitler. The reactionaries are always better organizers.

An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilizations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose - and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the Utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.

An inexorable law strikes and directs societies and civilisations. When, for lack of vitality, the past collapses, clinging to it serves no purpose — and yet it is this attachment to antiquated forms of life, to lost or bad causes, that makes so touching the anathemas of a de Maistre or a Bonald. Everything seems admirable and everything is false in the utopian vision; everything is execrable and everything seems true in the observations of the reactionaries.

Surely, though, the essence of being progressive was to minimize harm and protect the most vulnerable? Yet this was simply tossed aside by left-wingers, who elevated their own desires into rights that trumped the emotional, physical and intellectual well-being of their children – and then berated as heartless reactionaries those who criticized them!

Codependents are reactionaries. They overreact. They under-react. But rarely do they act.

Most codependents are reactionaries. We react with anger, guilt, shame, self-hate, worry, hurt, controlling gestures, caretaking acts, depression, desperation, and fury. We react with fear and anxiety. Some of us react so much it is painful to be around people, and torturous to be in large groups of people.

Anti-capitalism—recast somewhat implausibly as anti-globalization, as though strictly domestic capitalism were somehow a different and less offensive breed—was attractive to nativist reactionaries and internationalist radicals alike.

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

What were the workers going to do in the face of such a situation? Arm themselves? But that gave the enemy a basis for charging that the workers were planning civil war. The reactionaries had nine-tenths of the money, also nine-tenths of the press with which to spread confusion and fear. Said Raoul: "The extreme Left has Russia for a pattern and the Right has Italy and Germany, but where is the pattern for those who believe in the democratic process?

Reactionaries seek to excise and destroy the deepest and most essentially human aspects of a nation's character; they promulgate its most inhuman and superficial aspects. They prefer the husk to the kernel. When they promulgate nationalism, reactionaries try to destroy what people share at a deep level; they recognize only what people share at the most superficial level.

During the more conservative 1950s, President Eisenhower, who fashioned himself a "modern Republican," had said that "only a handful of reactionaries harbor the ugly thought of breaking unions and depriving working men and women of the right to join the union of their choice" and "hold some vain and foolish dream of spinning the clock back to days when organized labor was huddled, almost as a hapless mass.

Mao Zedong himself would have realized that the Communist Party has become weak. "All reactionaries are paper tigers," he said. And Mao said something else: repression breeds revolution. "[T]he Chinese," he told us, "never submit to tyrannical rule but invariably use revolutionary means to overthrow or change it.

When politicians began to see that every last thing that they did in public could be broadcast to a mass audience, the fact that the stakes were so much higher now that every moment became fraught caused them to become more cautious, and the consultants very gradually but inevitably became literal reactionaries.

They are not the vanguard for a new age of piety, but reactionaries, who hope that if they indoctrinate and intimidate they can block out modernity. Their desires mock their hopes. The rifles they fire, the nuclear weapons they crave come from a technology that has no connection to their sacred texts.

The death penalty can be tolerated only by extreme statist reactionaries who demand a state that is so powerful that it has the right to kill.

Reactionaries often describe both Marx and Lenin as theorists, without taking into consideration that their utopias inspired Russia and China - the two countries called upon to lead a new world which will allow for human survival if imperialism does not first unleash a criminal, exterminating war.