Robyn Hitchcock Quotes

Bandwagons roll through our lives. It's up to you whether you jump on them unquestioningly or jump on them to overturn them and subvert them.

I didn't have my parents to rebel against, but I had society, and that definitely is what they taught me. Just: Trust nothing.

Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

If it was up to me, there wouldn't be no such thing as the establishment.

The mainstream is always under attack.

We've always been a band that questions things.

In every part of our society, rules have to be questioned and adapted.

I went to public school for like, one day. I don't get it. Everybody tries to be exactly the same. I think being an outsider is a good thing.

The people who oppose your ideas are inevitably those who represent the established order that your ideas will upset.

In order to acquire a growing and lasting respect in society, it is a good thing, if you possess great talent, to give, early in your youth, a very hard kick to the right shin of the society that you love. After that, be a snob.

Everyone seems to be playing well within the boundaries of his usual rule set. I have yet to hear anyone say something that seemed likely to mitigate the idiocy of this age.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

I think that every child grows up with the ideas that what we are given, is our society. Your education, and your mother and father, they tell you this is how it is, but then you hit adolescence and you think, 'Is it? Why? Why is it like that?' Sometimes that questioning leads to something more.

I'm not really rebellious. People think I am, but I'm not.

You know, how much order is good? And when does order become too restrictive? Is a little bit of chaos okay, or is chaos always an evil force? I mean, these are questions that any kid who's ever been in a school cafeteria can relate to.

Breaking accepted rules does bring people together.

I wasn't a good rule-breaker when I was younger.

I'm such a Goody Two-shoes, but I get a vicarious thrill at someone sticking it to the Man.

Normal life cannot sustain revolutionary attitudes for long.

It's never popular among young people to be part of the establishment.

I think it's possible to have been a happy child, as I was, and still question and push back with regard to societal conventions.

I have observed that society in general always seems to honor its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.

Power is being able to affect the hegemony of existing systems.

Action requires co-operation, but in general if you set your face against custom, people will set their faces against you. They cannot tell whether you are right or wrong, but they know that you are guilty of a pragmatical assumption of superiority over them which they do not like.

It's very hard to transgress; we have the furniture of transgression without the imagery and iconography to actually do it.