Subversion Famous Quotes

Probably the most startling story I've heard was about a freelance copy editor for a women's magazine who discovered that a writer-a famous "domestic diva"-had plagiarized a recipe. The poor freelancer mysteriously died the very same night she invited the writer to a dinner party at her house ... But I don't mean to worry you. Statistically speaking, I believe that the number of copy editors murdered by their authors is fairly low.

One thing should be clear, but apparently it is not: if this were indeed our nature, we would be living in paradise. If pain, humiliation, and physical injury made us happy, we would be ecstatic. If being sold on street corners were a good time, women would jam street corners the way men jam football matches. If forced sex were what we craved, even we would be satisfied already. If being dominated by men made us happy, we would smile all the time. Women resist male domination because we do not like it. Political women resist male domination through overt, rude, unmistakable rebellion. They are called unnatural, because they do not have a nature that delights in being debased. Apolitical women resist male domination through a host of bitter subversions, ranging from the famous headache to the clinical depression epidemic among women to suicide to prescription-drug tranquilization to taking it out on the children; sometimes a battered wife kills her husband. Apolitical women are also called unnatural, the charge hurled at them as nasty or sullen or embittered individuals, since that is how they fight back. They too are not made happy by being hurt or dominated. In fact, a natural woman is hard to find. We are domesticated, tamed, made compliant on the surface, through male force, not through nature. We sometimes do what men say we are, either because we believe them or because we hope to placate them. We sometimes try to become what men say we should be, because men have power over our lives.

You don’t need to wait another day to figure out your calling. You’re living it, dear one. Your gifts have a place right now, in the job you have, in your stage of life, with the people who surround you. Calling is virtually never big or famous work; that is rarely the way the kingdom comes. It shows up quietly, subversively, almost invisibly. Half the time, it is unplanned—just the stuff of life in which a precious human steps in, the good news personified.

Dwarf things. Small things. Little things in relation to the norm. Insignificant things. Things with different dimensions. Curiously, the stories I like the most are made up of trivialities. Details. Trifles. These days, people look to what's big. The big picture, big sales figures, success. Bright lights, interviews, breaking news. Whatever's famous. Importance judged by fame. Maybe small things are subversive. Living on a modest scale compared to the norm. Maybe the dwarf is the hero of our time.

The Hungryalist or the hungry generation movement was a literary movement in Bengali that was launched in 1961, by a group of young Bengali poets. It was spearheaded by the famous Hungryalist quartet — Malay Roychoudhury, Samir Roychoudhury, Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Roy. They had coined Hungryalism from the word ‘Hungry’ used by Geoffrey Chaucer in his poetic line “in the sowre hungry tyme”. The central theme of the movement was Oswald Spengler’s idea of History, that an ailing culture feeds on cultural elements brought from outside. These writers felt that Bengali culture had reached its zenith and was now living on alien food. . . . The movement was joined by other young poets like Utpal Kumar Basu, Binoy Majumdar, Sandipan Chattopadhyay, Basudeb Dasgupta, Falguni Roy, Tridib Mitra and many more. Their poetry spoke the displaced people and also contained huge resentment towards the government as well as profanity. … On September 2, 1964, arrest warrants were issued against 11 of the Hungry poets. The charges included obscenity in literature and subversive conspiracy against the state. The court case went on for years, which drew attention worldwide. Poets like Octavio Paz, Ernesto Cardenal and Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg visited Malay Roychoudhury. The Hungryalist movement also influenced Hindi, Marathi, Assamese, Telugu & Urdu literature.

When we think of the historic struggles and conflicts of the current and past century, we naturally think of famous leaders: men who governed nations, commanded armies, and inspired movements in the defense of liberty, or in the service of ideologies which have obliterated liberty. Yet today, in this hour of human history, when the forces arrayed against the free spirit of man are more powerful, more brutal, and potentially more deadly than ever before, the single figure who has raised the highest flame of liberty heads no state, commands no army, and leads no movement that our eyes can see. But there is a movement—a hidden movement of human beings who have no offices and no headquarters, who are not represented in the great halls where nations meet, who every day risk or suffer more for the right to speak, to think, and to be true to themselves than any of us here are likely to risk in our lifetime. We heed this voice, not because it speaks for the left or the right or for any faction, but because it hurls truth and courage into the teeth of total power when it would be so much easier and more comfortable to submit to and embrace the lies by which that power lives. What is the strength of this voice? How has it broken through to us when others have been silenced? Its strength is art. Art illuminates the truth. It is, in a sense, subversive: subversive of hypocrisy, subversive of delusion, subversive of untruth. Few combinations in all of history have demonstrated the power of the pen coupled with the courage of free men’s minds. We need that power desperately today. We need it to teach the new and forgetful generations in our midst what it means to be free. Freedom is not an abstraction, neither is the absence of freedom. Art is a unique gift. It cannot be transmuted to another. But let us pray that this courage is contagious. We need echoes of this voice. We need to hear echoes in the White House. We need to hear the echoes in Congress and in the State Department and in the universities and media. The American ethos, from its conception to the contemporary, has been dedicated to the firm, unyielding belief in freedom. Freedom for all mankind, as well as for ourselves. It is in this spirit that we live our lives.

I told the universe (and anyone who would listen) that I was committed to living a creative life not in order to save the world, not as an act of protest, not to become famous, not to gain entrance to the canon, not to challenge the system, not to show the bastards, not to prove to my family that I was worthy, not as a form of deep therapeutic emotional catharsis . . . but simply because I liked it. So try saying this: “I enjoy my creativity.” And when you say it, be sure to actually mean it. For one thing, it will freak people out. I believe that enjoying your work with all your heart is the only truly subversive position left to take as a creative person these days.

Rule number one: There will be no large gatherings of the people to preach to each other. Rule number two: You will not sing your stupid little songs to your imaginary savior or God. Rule number three: You will not quote passages from that book you so adore. Rule number four: You will get up in the mornings when your person in charge says you will get up. You will also go to bed when your person in charge says to go to bed. Rule number five: The person in charge can appoint someone to be their eyes and ears. Video cameras can only pick up so much, so we need to know who the subversives in your groups are so we can deal with them before they cause too much trouble. “If even one of you does not abide by these rules, there will be consequences for your group. Punishment is completely up to your person in charge. If you abide by these rules and be good boys and girls, I’m sure we’ll get along famously. Too-da-loo and so long for now.

you. Calling is virtually never big or famous work; that is rarely the way the kingdom comes. It shows up quietly, subversively, almost invisibly. Half the time, it is unplanned—just the stuff of life in which a precious human steps in, the good news personified.

As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way, Ikkyū had been a patron - and a laureate - of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, "Crazy Cloud", had played subversively on the fact that "cloud water" was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet "cloud rain" was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the "red thread" ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks - since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of "no min" - while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as "Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk's skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil"; taken another way, it meant: "That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk's skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.

the doctrine of sanctification without personal effort, by simply “yielding ourselves to God,” is precisely the doctrine of the antinomian fanatics of the seventeenth century (to whom I have referred already, described in Rutherford’s Spiritual Antichrist), and that the tendency of it is evil in the extreme. Again, it would be easy to show that the doctrine is utterly subversive of the whole teaching of such tried and approved books as Pilgrim’s Progress, and that if we accept such doctrine, we ought to put Bunyan’s old book in the fire! If Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress simply yielded himself to God and never fought, struggled, or wrestled, I have read the famous allegory in vain. But the plain truth is, that people will persist in confusing two things that differ – that is, justification and sanctification.

In the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson translated this idea into the famous words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness…” What is interesting about this sentence is that “these truths” are anything but self-evident. They would have been regarded as subversive by Plato, who held that humanity is divided into people of gold, silver and bronze and that hierarchy is written into the structure of society.[7] They would have been incomprehensible to Aristotle who believed that some were born to rule and others to be ruled.[8] They are “self-evident” only to one steeped in the Bible.