Reactionaries Quotes

“How can one not be fond of something that the Daily Mail despises?”
― Stephen Fry

“A Radical is a man with both feet firmly planted--in the air. A Conservative is a man with two perfectly good legs who, however, has never learned to walk forward. A Reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards. A Liberal is a man who uses his legs and his hands at the behest--at the command--of his head.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt

“He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“The authoritarian character worships the past. What has been, will eternally be. To wish or to work for something that has not yet been before is crime or madness. The miracle of creation—and creation is always a miracle—is outside of his range of emotional experience.”
― Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom

“...some people, out of their own prejudice and fear, will lash out when the truth is presented to them. They are not interested in halting apocalypse because they have a vested interest in not doing so.”
― Steven Charleston, We Survived the End of the World: Lessons from Native America on Apocalypse and Hope

“Progress might be inevitable, but there was no reason they should knuckle under without a fight.”
― Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North

“At best, the American superhero is a 'morally neutral' enforcer of the status quo, that is to say, a souped-up policeman fighting scaled-up petty crime; at worst, he is a self-appointed vigilante delivering vengeance without the cumbersome red tape of a judicial system. Being 'morally neutral' means being complicit, and fetishising vigilantism borders on libertarianism (in the American sense), especially when the vigilante in question is a billionaire son of Gotham. To put it bluntly, the American superhero props up a reactionary, pro-capitalist view of the world.”
― Ra Page, The Cuckoo Cage: New Origin Stories

“But the reactionaries were not in retreat. Many of them had predicted violence, and such predictions are always a conscious or unconscious invitation to action. When people, especially in public office, talk about bloodshed as a concomitant of integration, they stir and arouse the hoodlums to acts of destruction, and often work under cover to bring them about. In Montgomery several public officials had predicted violence, and violence there had to be if they were to save face.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story