Reactionaries Quotes - Page 3

• A reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous state - that's never a possibility in my books. For me, everything's irreversible in the life of a society, as well as an individual's.

  Michel Houellebecq

  Book, Want, Return

  "Controversial author picks up IMPAC Literary Award", www.theguardian.com. May 13, 2002.

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• New York is the city of privilege. Here is the seat of the Invisible Power represented by the allied forces of finance and industry. This Invisible Government is reactionary, sinister, unscrupulous, mercenary, and sordid. It is wanting in national ideals and devoid of conscience... This kind of government must be scourged and destroyed.

  William Jennings Bryan

  New York, Cities, Government

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• When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.

  Andrew Sullivan

  Gay, Talking, People

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• The 'stream' we call science always flows forward; sometimes reactionary beavers block its flow, but the stream is never defeated by this; it accumulates, gathers strength; its waters get over the barrage and continue on their course. The advancement of science is the advancement of God, for science is nothing but human intelligence, and human intelligence is the most valuable treasure God has bequeathed us.

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Block, Science, Water

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• We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

  Fred Hampton

  Running, Fighting, Pigs

  "Power Anywhere Where There's People". Fred Hampton's speech at Olivet Church, www.historyisaweapon.com. 1969.

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• Whoever wants to reach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at conclusions that are absurd and reactionary both in the economic and the political sense.

  Vladimir Lenin

  Political, Democracy, Want

  "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution". "Collected Works", 9, Marxists, (p. 29), 1905.

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• Finally, a Jeet Kune Do man who says Jeet Kune Do is exclusively Jeet Kune Do is simply not with it. He is still hung up on his self-closing resistance, in this case anchored down to reactionary pattern, and naturally is still bound by another modified pattern and can move within its limits. He has not digested the simple fact that truth exists outside all molds; pattern and awareness is never exclusive. Again let me remind you Jeet Kune Do is just a name used, a boat to get one across, and once across it is to be discarded and not to be carried on one's back.

  Bruce Lee

  Moving, Simple, Men

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• Almost every key indicator of the current economy - unemployment, deficits, housing, energy - argues that Obama's reactionary all-powerful statist approach has only made things far worse.

  Victor Davis Hanson

  Powerful, Keys, Energy

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• History's one great lesson is that reactionaries are losers.

  George Otis

  Lessons, Loser

  George Otis (1991). “The Last of the Giants”, Chosen Books Publishing Company

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• As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem.

  Kenneth Rexroth

  Writing, Said

  Kenneth Rexroth (1961). “Assays”, Norfold, Conn

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• Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Smart, Technology, Practice

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• A spectre is haunting Europe-the spectre of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have entered into holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Czar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies. Where is the Party in opposition that has not been decried as Communistic by its opponents in power? Where the Opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of Communism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

  Karl Marx

  Party, Europe, Police

  Karl Marx (2018). “The Communist Manifesto & Selected Writings: & Selected Writings”, p.9, Pan Macmillan

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• I think my role as a musician is much more reactionary than that of the creative personality type who locks himself in a tower and then comes out with Pet Sounds or something. I just respond to stimuli more than anything.

  Blake Mills

  Thinking, Personality, Creative

  "Contact: Guitar Wunderkind Blake Mills". Interview with Jacob Blickenstaff, www.motherjones.com. February 24, 2015.

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• If every element of the song doesn't come within the first hour of writing, then you're never going to get it - if that makes sense. It's kind of like you need to be in a mental state where everything is so reactionary that you don't double-think anything, and so if it's not immediate then it's probably not going to happen at all, and you should probably toss the song.

  Zach Condon

  Song, Writing, Thinking

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• The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Color, Drawing, Lines

  Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass (2007). “Three African-American Classics: Up from Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, p.279, Courier Corporation

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• Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right.

  Mao Zedong

  Voice, People, Opinion

  Zedong Mao (1950). “On People's Democratic Dictatorship”

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• New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It's one of the few states in the nation with neither a sales tax nor an income tax. Social services are totally inadequate there, it ranks at the bottom in state aid to education--the state is literally shaped like a dunce cap--and its medical assistance program is virtually nonexistent. Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk.... The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.

  Alexander Theroux

  Moving, Mean, Eggs

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• The Congressional Budget Office is a reactionary socialist institution which does not believe in economic growth, does not believe in innovation, and does not believe in data that it has not internally generated.

  Newt Gingrich

  Leadership, Money, Party

  "Gingrich: CBO a 'reactionary socialist institution'" By Charles Riley, money.cnn.com. November 22, 2011.

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• Depending upon their version of Eurocentric Racialism, then 9 times out of 10 I feel very comfortable with it. This is how it's supposed to be. I would like to think the Klu [sic] Klux Klan version isn't included in this. Eurocentrics goes beyond reactionary Christian, political militias. I believe in seizing the end of time, not being a passive part of it.

  Douglas Pearce

  Christian, Believe, Thinking

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• A reactionary revolution is nothing but a high-speed evolution backwards!

  Mehmet Murat Ildan

  Revolution, Speed, Backwards

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• An American economist of two generations ago, H. J. Davenport, who was the best friend Thorstein Veblen ever had (Veblen actually lived for a time in Davenport's coal cellar) once said: "There is no reason why theoretical economics should be a monopoly of the reactionaries." All my life I have tried to take this warning to heart, and I dare call it to your favorable attention.

  Paul Samuelson

  Heart, Two, Generations

  Paul A. Samuelson (1972). “The Collected Scientific Papers of Paul Samuelson, Volume 3”, MIT Press

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• The Republican base is now made up of religious and neoconservative ideologues, and the uneducated white underclass with a token person of color or two up front on TV to obscure the all-white, all reactionary all backward — there-is-no-global-warming — rube reality. Actual conservatives, let alone the educated classes, have long since fled.

  Frank Schaeffer

  Religious, Redneck, Reality

  "Why Are the Republicans Such Anti-Obama Liars?". www.huffingtonpost.com. April 01, 2009.

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• Being conservative has never been regarded as old-fashioned. But if you fight for a sensible step in the right direction which others has deserted you will be branded "reactionary".

  Poul Henningsen

  Fighting, Steps, Conservative

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• Sensible Catholics have for generations been ignoring the views on contraception held by reactionary old men in the Vatican, but alas, since it is the business of all religious doctrines to keep their votaries in a state of intellectual infancy (how else do they keep absurdities seeming credible?), insufficient numbers of Catholics have been able to be sensible.

  A.C. Grayling

  Religious, Men, Views

  A.C. Grayling (2012). “Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness”, p.12, Oberon Books

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• But what we know, we who are either observers of a business we once were in and loved, or are people within it now, our business as a whole, when it is not obsessed with the business of business, is eaten up with a form of cultural conservatism which is truly amazing. Indeed, more often than not it is eaten up with pure reactionary-ism.

  Hodding Carter III

  People, Isms, Obsessed

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