Reactionary quotes:

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Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future. -- Aneurin Bevan
Reactionary: One who wants the rules enforced so nobody can take his pile away from him the way he got it from others. -- Evan Esar
In our society mothers take the place elsewhere occupied by the Fates, the System, Negroes, Communism or Reactionary Imperialist Plots; mothers go on getting blamed until they're eighty, but shouldn't take it personally. -- Katharine Whitehorn
All adventure is now reactionary. -- William F. Buckley, Jr.
A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary. -- Mikhail Bakunin
I'm fairly conservative on social issues, but not extremely conservative and not reactionary. -- John Howard
When religious leaders get involved in elections, it is usually with a reactionary social agenda. -- Elizabeth Joan Smith
The reactionary is always willing to take a progressive attitude on any issue that is dead. -- Theodore Roosevelt
Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary. -- Friedrich Ebert
The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow. -- Noam Chomsky
Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas. -- Christopher Hitchens
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along. -- Evelyn Waugh
I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. -- Tom Wolfe
I think tolerance is something everybody needs to be reminded of, especially in a reactionary political world. Well, actually, I should say, a reactionary political climate. -- Bruce Davison
By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative', one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary', one who won't go at all. -- Woodrow Wilson
We oppose the reactionary policies of the U.S. government but we do not oppose the American people. We want to have many good friends in the United States. -- Kim Jong Il
Be reactionary. React to what the market wants. And the market wants one-on-one real time engagement. Now that we have the tools to engage, I'm going to continue fighting for the end user. -- Gary Vaynerchuk
We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didn't walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud. -- Saul Williams
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
It is only with burning anger that we can speak of this attack by counter-revolutionary reactionary elements against the capital of our country, against our people's democratic order and the power of the working class. -- Janos Kadar
There's a toxicity within gaming culture, and also in tech culture, that drives this misogynist hatred, this reactionary backlash against women who have anything to say, especially those who have critiques or who are feminists. -- Anita Sarkeesian
It's very clear you have to engage the public and say: You have to vote no on 74, no on 75, no on 76, no on 77. Those are the issues that Arnold pushing. And those are reactionary, Republican initiatives. -- Warren Beatty
It didn't take long for the world to realize that the Shah was an enlightened liberal next to the bloody reactionary regime that followed, and which executed more people in three months than the Shah had done in 30 years. -- Alexander Haig
The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. -- Martin Luther King, Jr.
I am sure that in Canada the people appreciate this principle, and the general intelligence which prevails over that country is such that I am sure there is no danger of a reactionary policy ever finding a response in the hearts of any considerable number of our people. -- Alexander Mackenzie
Now that virtually every career is an option for ambitious girls, it can no longer be considered regressive or reactionary to reintroduce discussion of marriage and motherhood to primary education. We certainly do not want to return to the simplistic duality of home economics classes for girls and wood shop for boys. -- Camille Paglia
Reactionary conservatives are smiling through the racial apocalypse. To them, race baiting is a joke, as 'humorist' Rush Limbaugh will tell you when he's calling Mexicans 'stupid.' Or it's a matter of semantics when they claim that Sonia Sotomayor is a 'racialist' which, far as I can tell, is the smooth jazz version of being a racist. -- John Ridley
I'm not a reactionary. -- Renee Fleming
An artist must be a reactionary -- Evelyn Waugh
A revolutionary woman can't have no reactionary man. -- Assata Shakur
Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands. -- Robert Conquest
A reactionary revolution is nothing but a high-speed evolution backwards! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
I can be very reactionary. It's a gift and a curse. -- Xosha Roquemore
[There are] judges who stretch the law...to suit reactionary attitudes. -- Michael Foot
Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary. -- Josip Broz Tito
Earnestness is good; it means business. But fanaticism overdoes, and is consequently reactionary. -- Charles Spurgeon
California is the most reactionary state in America. Fascist sentiments are very strong here. -- Ilya Ilf
Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible. -- George Orwell
To get nominated by the Republican Party you've got to be pretty reactionary, really. -- Randy Newman
To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear. -- Avital Ronell
No influence so quickly converts a radical into a reactionary as does his election to power. -- Elisabeth Marbury
The continuous war between the reactionary and the progressive forces determine the degree of mankind's happiness. -- Mehmet Murat ildan
I'd be a conservative if I'd never met any. They're selfish, mean-spirited, egocentric, reactionary, and boring. -- Pat Conroy
Well, there's a lot to react against![in response to the accusation that she was a reactionary] -- Margaret Thatcher
As Aristotle said, you have to be an aristocrat or a reactionary to write a good proletarian poem. -- Kenneth Rexroth
History respects revolutions; and yet, if a revolution is progressive, support it; if it is reactionary, resist it! -- Mehmet Murat ildan
Fear is ugly because it makes you irrational. Fear makes you jump to conclusions. Fear makes you reactionary. -- David Heinemeier Hansson
Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table. -- Calvin Coolidge
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary. -- Hanya Yanagihara
Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech. -- Roland Barthes
The reactionary point of view was always so easy to put, the complex, radical argument always so easy to put down. -- Ben Elton
In Russia a man is called reactionary if he objects to having his property stolen and his wife and children murdered. -- Winston Churchill
To the reactionary ear every whispered criticism of the elite classes has always sounded like the opening shot of an uprising. -- Richard Hofstadter
An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along. -- Evelyn Waugh
I play a lot of strategy games and team and reactionary games. So it's a different sort of skill that you're practicing. -- Asa Butterfield
Learning slowly to not be so reactionary while inserting verbal gratitude into stressful situations is almost like being healed of mental blindness. -- Ann Voskamp
Surrealism can only deliver a reactionary judgment; can make out of history only an accumulation of oddities, a joke, a death trip. -- Susan Sontag
Smart technologies are not just disruptive; they can also preserve the status quo. Revolutionary in theory, they are often reactionary in practice. -- Evgeny Morozov
I think Hollywood's gotten more reactionary and conservative over the years, because there's no longer art in Hollywood. Art suffers in Hollywood. -- Ricky Gervais
I don't recognize this new brand of Republicanism that's afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. -- Hillary Clinton
In America, any man who is not a reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell. -- Arthur Miller
Pianists call me a composer, composers call me a pianist. The classicists think me a futurist, and the futurists call me a reactionary. -- Anton Rubinstein
If you go back 150 years you are a reactionary; but if you go back 1000 years, you are in the foremost ranks of progress. -- Isabel Paterson
A major fault, for example, is the fact that, along with the materialist principle, Darwin introduced into his theory of evolution reactionary Malthusian ideas. -- Trofim Lysenko
The middle man governs, however extreme may seem to be the men who sit on the Front Bench, in their reactionary or revolutionary opinions. -- Beatrice Webb
The spirit of Revolution should always permeate the soul of humanity, so that the reactionary forces may not accumulate to check its eternal onward march -- Bhagat Singh
...a great army of the proletarian party [must be] prepared to smash the reactionary forces and to clear the way for the advanced forces of society. -- J. Stalin
Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. -- Slavoj Å½iÅ¾ek
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
Today I want to puke when I hear the word 'radical' applied so slothfully and stupidly to Islamist murderers; the most plainly reactionary people in the world. -- Christopher Hitchens
The boldest plans for the future invoke the authority of the past; and that even a revolutionary seeks to satisfy himself that he is also a reactionary. -- G.K. Chesterton
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
There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation. -- Spruille Braden
Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes. -- Jack Schwartz
Aside from rabid Islamists, no one who wishes to be taken seriously can publicly say anything bad about the old Jews of Europe without sounding like reactionary troglodytes. -- Jack Schwartz
The life is worth living. It's not true, what the tired and reactionary say. We're not on this earth to suffer and die. We're here to fulfill a mission. -- Joseph Goebbels
It seems to be generally acknowledged that sexism is far from defeated, flourishing through religions and other reactionary ideologies, which would definitely and gladly erase the concept of feminism. -- Laura Mulvey
By 'radical,' I understand one who goes too far; by 'conservative,' one who does not go far enough; by 'reactionary,' one who won't go at all. -- Woodrow Wilson
Women are never the protagonists; we're always reactionary against everything that's done to us. I like people who write for women that have got a bit more about them. -- Neve McIntosh
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
If I have called Cubism a new order, it is without any revolutionary ideas or any reactionary ideas... One cannot escape from one's own epoch, however revolutionary one may be. -- Georges Braque
Racism serves as the cutting edge of the most reactionary movements. An ideology that starts by declaring one human being inferior to another is the slope whose end is at Auschwitz. -- Ken Livingstone
Tangentially, Americans, despite many of us being prone to sometimes-eyebrow-raising disclosures about our private lives on social media, still retain what I think of as reactionary views about sexuality and intimacy. -- Christine Sneed
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
Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms. -- Tim Wise
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
The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation. -- bell hooks
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
We are ripples of consciousness of the vast ocean of consciousness. If we get agitated and become part of the reactionary and vitriolic behavior sometimes around us, we will only add to the disturbance. -- Deepak Chopra
We cannot continually barricade ourselves under some falsified idea of race, because our idea of blackness and race is simply reactionary. Africans didnt walk around Africa being black and proud, they walked around proud. -- Saul Williams
An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary. -- Lion Feuchtwanger
I have no motif, only motivation. I believe that motivation is the real thing, the natural thing, and that the motif is old-fashioned, even reactionary (as stupid as the question about the meaning of life) -- Gerhard Richter

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