Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.

Rick Perlstein

/images/quoteimage/alastair-reynolds-17814.jpg

I don't like a lot of what's published as hard SF. Much of it is right-wing, reactionary crap.

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

Years Year World

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

Intelligence Art Anger

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Andre Maurois

Art Age Us

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

Marriage Art Age

Reactionary: a man walking backwards with his face to the future.

Aneurin Bevan

War Future Wit

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

Women Men Within

True conservatives fear anything that is at odds with the status quo, even to the extent of being unable to recognise when the status quo represents injustice. And reactionary conservatives actually want to tear down the gains of the past.

Anthony Albanese

Fear Wit Want

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

Think Thin T

Obsession with conventional ideas of 'success' can be harmful enough, but compound that stress with relationships, family, financial woes and health concerns, and you find yourself in a constant state of fight or flight. This causes people to be more reactionary, which further perpetuates the cycle of stress.

Ariel Garten

Success Relationship Pet

I tend to be reactionary.

Billy Corgan

Tend Ten T

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

World Well Very

There is a reactionary conservative side of classical music, which is not the most exciting side of it. The side that draws me in, there's a real encouragement of risk-taking, going back to masters of that tradition like Beethoven and Bartok and Stravinsky.

Bryce Dessner

Music Men Courage

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

Marriage Home Education

Pakistan has to export a lot of uneducated people, many of whom have become infected with the most barbaric reactionary ideas.

Christopher Hitchens

Wit Whom Who

The only part of 'A Ghost Story' that was reactionary was a temporal one. I had spent so much time making 'Pete's Dragon' that I was really impatient and excited to make something new. When this project presented itself, I was ready to jump right into it. I started shooting two days after 'Pete's Dragon.'

David Lowery

Time Pet Art

In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'

Edmund White

UN T See

The lack of trust in supranational entities and cosmopolitan elite creates a fertile ground for tribalist belongings and reactionary politics.

Elif Safak

Trust Politics Us

When religious leaders get involved in elections, it is usually with a reactionary social agenda.

Elizabeth Joan Smith

Age Wit Usual

A reactionary is a somnambulist walking backwards.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

War Walking Walk

We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with international proletarian revolution.

Fred Hampton

Without democracy there is no freedom. Violence, no matter who is using it, is always reactionary.

Friedrich Ebert

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

There's no such thing as the contemporary novel. Before I seem the complete reactionary, let me add that I've happily joined in many discussions about 'the contemporary novel' where what that usually, unproblematically means is novels that have appeared recently or may appear soon.

Graham Swift

The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.

Hanya Yanagihara

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

Heather Cox Richardson

You may call me selfish if you will, conservative or reactionary, or use any other harsh adjective you see fit to apply, but an American I was born, an American I have remained all my life.

Henry Cabot Lodge

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

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

American fundamentalist thought connected strongly to reactionary political ideology as nervous Christians pushed back against liberal reforms on many fronts.

Jay Parini

I never practice calls. Everything you hear is reactionary. The way I look at it is that broadcasters are just paid observers, just there to tell you what we see.

Jim Nantz

I'm fairly conservative on social issues, but not extremely conservative and not reactionary.

John Howard

Everything TSA does is reactionary - first they ban the box cutters, then of course you have to take your shoes off, then you have to take the liquids out, now we have to be patted down in our private areas because of the diaper bomber.

John Mica

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

Looking at myself retrospectively, how I survived, how I was reactionary as my surroundings were ever changing and I didn't have time to make thought out choices. My growth was quick, forced and dynamic.

Julia Fox

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

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

Nationalism of the Irish type is often regarded as reactionary. With the World Revolution and the Classless Society waiting for the midwife, why take a torch to the stable to assist at the birth of a puppy? Even if the puppy is pedigree. On this question I am unable to make up my mind.

Louis MacNeice

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.

There are two Tory parties: the trendy, socially liberal Notting Hill set which dominates at the national level, and the unreconstructed, reactionary, and often bigoted members of Conservative associations at the local level. The latter have yet to reconcile themselves to the reality of modern, multiracial Britain.

Mehdi Hasan

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

Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.

Mikhail Bakunin

Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on.

N. K. Jemisin

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

The neo-cons constitute a radical reactionary fringe of the planning spectrum, but the spectrum is narrow.

Noam Chomsky

What we discovered, counter-intuitively, is that when you start killing a cancer cell, one of the things it does in order to survive is to spread even further. It causes itself to form new blood vessels. We've termed this 'reactionary angiogenesis.'

Patrick Soon-Shiong

I'm not a reactionary.

Renee Fleming

The reactionary percentage of the electorate in these United States has been relatively constant since McCarthy's day; I'd estimate it as hovering around 30 percent. A minority, but one never all that enamored of the niceties of democracy - they see themselves as fighting for the survival of civilization, after all.

Rick Perlstein

Conservatives are time-biders. And they understand, as Corey Robin explains in his indispensable book 'The Reactionary Mind,' that the direction of human history is not on their side - that is why they are reactionaries - because, other things equal, civilization does tend towards more inclusion, more emancipation, more liberalism.

Rick Perlstein

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow up all traces of human volition and dignity. The conclusion is based on conservative moral convictions that reason can't shake.

Rick Perlstein