Contrarianism Quotes

Being right too soon is socially unacceptable.

The majority is always wrong; the minority is rarely right.

Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

I think there are some people who have this thing where, from the very beginning, some part of them rejects convention.

When two or more people agree on an issue, I form on the other side.

How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?

If someone starts agreeing with me, I don't like it. Out of pique, I become something else.

There aren't many poster children for cool angst. Everybody thinks it's cool if you're the bad girl.

As soon as you tell me to do one thing, I do the opposite. As soon as someone tells me not to get any more tattoos, I have this intense fire burning inside me to cover myself with them. I don't care if it's self-destructive. I just have that need to rebel.

Dear child, I only did to you what the sparrow did to you; I am old when it is fashionable to be young; I cry when it is fashionable to laugh. I hated you when it would have taken less courage to love.

Punk rock, to me, was always outsiderness. When I first saw large-group-scene punk rock, I was repelled by it, because there were way too many people who agreed with each other.

Nobody's going to tell me how to be different, so stop asking me. Stop asking me what two-plus-two is. Everybody knows two-plus-two is five.

Ask a woman's advice, and whatever she advises, Do the very reverse and you're sure to be wise.

If I hear someone say something, and they're 100 per cent about it, then it's almost inevitable that I'll take the opposite view. I guess I feel at odds with things like society. Absolutism is always a trigger for me.

I am extremely rebellious. I have this strong, defiant spirit.

I've never been one to just do what I'm told. I don't say that necessarily with pride, it's just something that has gotten me in trouble before.

It is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular is easy... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it.

It's an interesting dynamic living in New York in general as a Boston fan. It's kind of fun that way. It's fun to be the contrarian when everyone hates you as long as your team is winning.

The most recent example and the most, I think, appalling example was when Martin Peretz, the owner - and I stress owner - of The New Republic fired a journalist who I think was uncommonly skilled and full of integrity and passion and all that stuff. But he had criticized regularly the former pupil and friend of Martin Peretz, Al Gore, so he was fired. That's contrarianist that went around - that did - that was not rewarded.

I have contrarian tendencies.

The older I get, the more of an anarchist I become, and I don't mean in a punk rock way.

I typically do the opposite of what people think I am going to do.

We've always been a nation of heretics.

Fox opposes a Syria peace plan because its modus operandi is to foment dissent in the form of a relentless and irrational contrarianism to Barack Obama and all things Democratic, to advance its ultimate objective of creating a deliberately misinformed body politic whose fear, anger, mistrust, and discontent is the manna upon which it sustains its parasitic succubus-like existence.

I just have to go against the grain. I mean, I can be objective and do what I need to do, handle my everyday living, follow directions, etc. But there's something that's always been attracted to that taboo. It's been like that since I was a child.