Defiance, not obedience, is the American's answer to overbearing authority.
The woe of mortality makes humans God-like. It is because we know that we must die that we are so busy making life. It is because we are aware of mortality that we preserve the past and create the future. Mortality is ours without asking--but immortality is something we must build ourselves. Immortality is not a mere absence of death; it is defiance and denial of death. It is 'meaningful' only because there is death, that implacable reality which is to be defied.
There is no "beginning" of feminism in the sense that there is no beginning to defiance in women.
Civil disobedience is the core of American defiance against kings and emperors.
I think it's an American curse that most of us think we are special. . . . everyone believes themselves to be superior to the majority of the population in some way. Sometimes it's their looks, other times their perceived sex appeal (often in obvious defiance of their looks), and other times it is their real or imagined talent for acting, writing, painting or banging on the drums. And because people are so susceptible to flattery, there exists an entire industry made up of scam artists whose sole goal is to fleece the flatterable.
Defiance through compliance.
I want nevertheless to add that for me the world is a defiance of common sense.
The charm of Ronald Reagan is not just that he kept telling us screwy things, it was that he believed them all. No wonder we trusted him, he never lied to us. . . . His stubbornness, even defiance, in the face of facts ('stupid things,' he once called them in a memorable slip) was nothing short of splendid. . . . This is the man who proved that ignorance is no handicap to the presidency.
I write out of defiance.
There is no person in this room whose basic rights are not involved in any successful defiance to the carrying out of court orders.
I consider it…as subverting the fundamental and characteristic principle of the Government…and as bidding defiance to the sense in which the Constitution is known to have been proposed, advocated, and adopted. If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one.
The United States is going to continue to punish Iran because of its defiance.
She thinks petting me is an honor. This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention.
In the end, it is our defiance that redeems us. If wolves had a religion – if there was a religion of the wolf – that it is what it would tell us.
Well, there's been plenty of ultimatums, and one thing that we better be very clear is that we can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community that we've had.
. . . it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
The modern moralists extol. . . the cult of practical activity in defiance of the disinterested life.
It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of slavery. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.
Creativity is an act of defiance.
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
