Quotes About Resistance

Thousands of Polish soldiers rushed west to fight the invading German army, while the Polish government slipped out the back door and raced for neutral Rumania.

Maybe you won't rock a cradle, Muriel. Some women seem to prefer to rock the boat.

requetés (the Carlist militia)

As early as 1977, the now iconic comic strip Paracuellos appeared. It was provocatively named – for Paracuellos, the village outside Madrid where the Republicans shot over two thousand prisoners during the wartime siege of the capital,12 lay at the heart of regime martyrology.

What is demonstrably the case is that Franco did Hitler the colossal service of altering the European balance of power in favour of the German-Italian Axis, while Spanish Republican resistance, achieved for nearly three years in the teeth of British policy, actively delayed other forms of Nazi aggression in Europe and, in so doing, made Britain itself a priceless gift of time to re-arm.

The kind of killing perpetrated by civilian vigilantes – often called the "hot repression" – tended to be what happened in the period immediately after rebels took control of a specific town or village.

the death squads came, by night to "take out" of gaol in the deadly sacas, exactly the same form of extrajudicial execution that ended the lives of her two brothers and of tens of thousands of others across Spain.

those with the habit of line-crossing as a mode of being would never and could never fit the requirements of any state narrative.

I suppose," says Jeremy, "what I don't like is that the moment you fix something, it starts to break down again, that an engine works against itself. By its very act of running, it weakens itself, tries to come undone. Everything is slowly worked loose by the vibrations of the moving engine." Just like us, thinks Harriet.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought!

Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas.

The patriarchy may have stolen our freedoms, but we don't have to be complicit in the abandonment of our souls.

If feminism doesn't frighten people with power, it is toothless.

I think of my chastened surprise when Mabel played with a paper telescope. She is real. She can resist the meanings humans give her. But the condor? The condor has no resistance to us at all. I stare at the attenuated, drifting image on the gallery screen. It is a shadow, a figure of loss and hope; it is hardly a bird at all.

Harriet's mother, Margot, is no fan of gingerbread. She stood alone over her mixing bowl and stirred with the clenched fist of a pugilist.

The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they're freeing us.

So everybody lives the way they're told to. The way they have to. Everybody most of the time. Not ever all the time. Hair style, clothing, manner of speech, ideas, cars, houses, and everything. Just like they have to. Even the way we walk. But not all the time. Comes a time when everybody breaks out. And that's the only characteristic of human nature I know of. Not greed, not obedience, not violence, nor any of those things the capitalists would have us believe are intrinsic. Only rebellion.

Perhaps what we need is a radical reconceptualization of time: not as an adversary to be vanquished (a race against time) or a criminal to be tracked down (fugitive time) or an employee to be disciplined (time management) or a commodity to be squandered (wasted time) but as an expansive, fluid entity that will always resist our efforts to contain it. Time can enrich our lives (quality time), transport us to new places and paces (island time), and help us out in moments of need:

Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.

Henri Philippe Pétain

The obscure only exists that it may cease to exist. In it lies the opportunity of all victory and all progress. Whether it call itself fatality, death, night, or matter, it is the pedestal of life, of light, of liberty and the spirit. For it represents resistance -- that is to say, the fulcrum of all activity, the occasion for its development and its triumph.

War is a brutal and fierce means of pacification; it means the suppression of resistance by the destruction or enslavement of the conquered.

Never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and truth.

One should never put on one's best trousers to go out to battle for freedom and truth.