Defiance Quotes

With the pride of the artist, you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance. (Norman Mailer)
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. View quote
Richard Russo
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade. View quote
Hannah Arendt
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye, I see the lords of humankind pass by. View quote
Oliver Goldsmith
I am certain that I speak on behalf of my entire nation when I say: Today we are all Americans - in grief, as in defiance. View quote
Benjamin Netanyahu
In War Resolution. In Defeat Defiance. In Victory Magnanimity. In Peace Goodwill. View quote
Winston Churchill
American citizens are instrumental in carrying on a traffic in enslaved Africans, equally in violation of the laws of humanity and in defiance of those of their own country. The same just and benevolent motives which produced interdiction in force against this criminal conduct will doubtless be felt by Congress in devising further means of suppressing the evil. View quote
James Madison
The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment. View quote
Norbert Wiener
To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages. View quote
Alexander Hamilton
But the safety of the world, in some sense, depends on your saying "no" to inhumane ideas. Standing up for one's own integrity makes you no friends. It is costly. Yet defiance of the mob, in the service of that which is right, is one of the highest expressions of courage I know. (Gabrielle Giffords)
A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers harm done to others, whose greatest passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair. View quote
Abraham Joshua Heschel
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right. View quote
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
As a democratic Socialist profoundly committed to the rule of law, I could not condone, let alone encourage, defiance of the law. View quote
Anthony Crosland
Good work is always done in defiance of management. View quote
Bob Woodward
In defiance of Miss Maccalariat I'd like to commit hanky-panky with you, Miss Adora Belle Dearheart... well, certainly hanky, and possibly panky when we get to know one another better. View quote
Terry Pratchett
Despereaux marveled at his own bravery. He admired his own defiance. And then, reader, he fainted. :(. View quote
Kate DiCamillo
The majority of South Africans, black and white, recognize that apartheid has no future. It has to be ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace and security. The mass campaign of defiance and other actions of our organization and people can only culminate in the establishment of democracy. View quote
Nelson Mandela
Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went. View quote
Bernard Bailyn
With hearts fortified with these animating reflections, we most solemnly, before God and the world, declare that, exerting the utmost energy of those powers, which our beneficent Creator hath graciously bestowed upon us, the arms we have been compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves. View quote
John Dickinson (delegate)
The broad outlines of the Double Cross deception have been known since 1972, when Sir John Masterman, the former chairman of the double agent committee, controversially published his account of the operation in defiance of official secrecy. (Ben Macintyre)
To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen. View quote
Jerome Groopman
Ever since I was a small child, I've had this feeling - it's in my nature, and so it's not even pretentious - that if everyone's going one way, I will go the other, just by some kind of spirit of defiance. View quote
Charlotte Rampling
Creativity is an act of defiance. View quote
Twyla Tharp
Serious art has been the work of individual artists whose art has had nothing to do with style because they were not in the least connected with the style or the needs of the masses. Their work arose rather in defiance of their times. View quote
Franz Marc