Quotes About Subversion

Bugis Street, once famous for its transvestite prostitutes - the sort of place where one could have imagined Noel Coward, ripped on opium, cocaine and the local tailoring, just off his rickshaw for a night of high buggery - had, when it proved difficult to suppress, a subway station dropped on top of it.

She rolls over, abandoning this pointless parody of sleep. Gropes for her clothes. A small boy's black Fruit Of The Loom T-shirt, thoroughly shrunken, a thin gray V-necked pullover purchased by the half-dozen from a supplier to New England prep schools, and a new and oversized pair of black 501's, every trademark carefully removed. Even the buttons on these have been ground flat, featureless, by a puzzled Korean locksmith, in the Village, a week ago.

Their intention, clearly, was to beat the censors at their own game. If pictures had to be neutered, they'd rather do the castration themselves.

There's something intrinsically radical about the fantastic aesthetic - starting from the premise that the impossible is true, attempting to undermine expectations.

Women must write through their bodies, they must invent the impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes, and rhetorics, regulations and codes, they must submerge, cut through, get beyond the ultimate reverse-discourse, including the one that laughs at the very idea of pronouncing the word "silence"...In one another we will never be lacking.

Any startling piece of work has a subversive element in it, a delicious element often. Subversion is only disagreeable when it manifests in political or social activity. In what we call art, it's one of the most desirable characteristics of a piece of work.

Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face tonight instead of mine.

For a punk Penny could be an unbelievable drag.

I'm trying to trick people into thinking about the unthinkable by using pop culture images.

I like taking genres and subverting them. I did that with 'In the Valley of Elah.' I said, 'Okay, this is just a murder mystery. Relax.' And then, two thirds of the way through, I broke every convention of a murder mystery.

Comedy was one of those genres that while appearing quite jolly was actually highly dangerous.

She had, in a few short words, utterly defiled, defamed and defaced the finely tuned social order that was the bedrock of the Collective.

When I see a word held hostage to manhood I have to rescue it. Sweet trembling word, locked in a tower, tired of your Prince coming and coming.

She grew in secret, away from their eyes. Outwardly she was obedient and loving, but inside she was feeding a hunger—

It's the well-behaved children that make the most formidable revolutionaries. They don't say a word, they don't hide under the table, they eat only one piece of chocolate at a time. But later on, they make society pay dearly.

The Pistols were like my work of art. They were my canvas.

I learned that people like my work because I praise things that others don't like.

Street art, of course, is political, because it's illegal, so the very act of doing it is an act of defiance.

If we could just find out who's in charge, we could kill him.

The easiest way to destroy a country is from within.

He was eager to tell me about his latest work, which consisted of him vomiting on a footpath, then cordoning it off. Each artwork lasted until the first 'philistine' thought to take the rope down. 'In that way, the philistine is drawn – whether he likes it or not – into my art. He becomes part of it…and the vomit part of him. Essentially, it is the cosmic vomit. We all spew it. It blurs the boundaries, subverts the liminal…

Looking back, it is in the understanding of human sexuality, its subversion really, that Barack Obama left his stamp upon the United States. One can hope the stamp is not indelible.

That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.

Colonialism oppressed and subverted Africans and remade them as scavengers, pleaders, and servants