Social Rebellion Quotes

It is a most extraordinary thing that although most of us are opposed to political tyranny and dictatorship, we inwardly accept the authority, the tyranny, of another to twist our minds and our way of life. So if we completely reject, not intellectually but actually, all so-called … authority, all ceremonies, rituals and dogmas, it means that we stand alone and are already in conflict with society; we cease to be respectable human beings.

I'm not gay, although I wish I were, just to piss off the homophobes.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

What's really interesting is when you get a brand-new wave that has no connection to anything else. It always reflects society. The flappers would cut the dresses and make them looser, they smoked, their hair was short. It was a rebellion against the corset and the Edwardian era.

I didn't do anything with the thought that I want to go against society or bend any rules.

Drag resists conservatism in the most basic way possible, and also in the most effective way possible, because it's improper when it comes to looks, which is everything in conservative systems.

Conventional people are roused to fury by departure from convention, largely because they regard such departure as a criticism of themselves.

That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: 'Go away, you bunch of boring people.

To talk of resisting what is called public opinion as a crime, is to make Socrates an anarchist and Jesus Christ a felon.

The violent illiteracies of the graffiti, the clenched silence of the adolescent, the nonsense cries from the stage-happening, are resolutely strategic. The insurgent and the freak-out have broken off discourse with a cultural system which they despise as a cruel, antiquated fraud. They will not bandy words with it. Accept, even momentarily, the conventions of literate linguistic exchange, and you are caught in the net of the old values, of the grammars that can condescend or enslave.

We used to be either punks or goths - we hate Nazis!

I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along.

The Beat Generation - that term is even more familiar now, even more than say the '70s. Hype is built and established and people link it back to a certain generation, in this case the '40s and '50s. Now everyone knows that that group was the Beat Generation.

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

I don't know why people keep banging on about the '60s. I came from a conventional family and I didn't go off with different people - I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.

When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

This law was not making people drink any less, but it was making hypocrites and law breakers of a great number of people.

Punk to me was a form of free speech. It was a moment when suddenly all kinds of strange voices that no reasonable person could ever have expected to hear in public were being heard all over the place.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

I was in my hippie stage. It was tough for my father. First it was the long hair, then the bubbles.

The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.