Quotes About Reactionary

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind.

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

We have almost reached a point where if one values democracy, one is denounced as reactionary. I think that this will be one of the attitudes that will be found most fascinating to historians of the future. For one thing, the young people who cultivate this attitude towards democracy are usually those who have never experienced its opposite: people who've lived under tyranny, value democracy.

I fancied - of course it may have been only my fancy - that he looked slightly ill at ease. The company in which he found himself was, so I could imagine, little to his liking. He was a strictly conservative and somewhat reactionary young man - the kind of character to have stepped out of the Middle Ages by some regrettable mistake. His infatuation for the extremely modern Jane Wilkinson was one of those anachronistic jokes that Nature so loves to play.

A striking feature of moral and political argument in the modern world is the extent to which it is innovators, radicals, and revolutionaries who revive old doctrines, while their conservative and reactionary opponents are the inventors of new ones.

Without a vision, we become a debating society and a place where habit quickly becomes 'tradition.' Tradition often becomes an excuse for repression, bigotry, or reactionary thinking.

Ibn Taymiyyah was a worrying figure to the establishment. His return to the fundamentals of the Quran and sunnah and his denial of much of the rich spirituality and philosophy of Islam may have been reactionary, but it was also revolutionary. He outraged the conservative ulama, who clung to the textbook answers, and criticized the Mamluk government of Syria for practices which contravened Islamic law as he understood it.

History respects revolutions; and yet, if a revolution is progressive, support it; if it is reactionary, resist it!

The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march

I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people.

We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud.

There is no reason why pragmatists steeped in Darwinism should not be reactionary or conservative, and so it is no surprise that some have been.

Don't expect or demand from groups what they usually cannot give. Doing so will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. They must and will be concerned with identity, boundaries, self-maintenance, self-perpetuation, and self-congratulation. This is their nature and purpose.

The machines compel and you move to their rhythm. Remember, you're a reactionary person.

Dogmatic theology is, by its very nature, unchangeable. The same can be said in regard to the spirit of the law. Law was and is to protect the past and present status of society and, by its very essence, must be very conservative, if not reactionary. Theology and law are both of them static by their nature.5

To say that religion and priestcraft have played a conservative role in history is an understatement. One might as well say that bubonic plague has killed a few people, or that Hitler was a little bit strange. The chief role of religion has always been reactionary. This is its evolutionary function, in the dialectic of the circuitry of the brain.

many of the young people who are, in fact, progressive have been emigrating en masse for jobs and new lives abroad, leaving the reactionary ones behind.

As capitalism developed and the bourgeoisie became the reactionary ruling class after victorious bourgeois revolutions in various countries, nationalism was used as a means of defending the interests of the bourgeois class. The bourgeoisie disguised their class interests as national interests, and used nationalism as an ideological instrument for solidifying their class domination.

Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table.

Lewis was an exceptionally skillful exposer of ideological forces and their titanic influence over us, but he rarely gets credit for this from contemporary intellectuals because it is their most treasured beliefs that, more often than not, he is exposing. So instead of praising him for the acuity of his insights, they call him "reactionary" or "Victorian

the most progressive minister must shipwreck if he has a block of reactionary bureaucrats against him. And in Germany the bureaucrats all have their jobs still. —These pen-pushing Napoleons are invincible.