Iconoclasm Quotes

“Tegularius was a willful, moody person who refused to fit into his society. Every so often he would display the liveliness of his intellect. When highly stimulated he could be entrancing; his mordant wit sparkled and he overwhelmed everyone with the audacity and richness of his sometimes somber inspirations. But basically he was incurable, for he did not want to be cured; he cared nothing for co-ordination and a place in the scheme of things. He loved nothing but his freedom, his perpetual student status, and preferred spending his whole life as the unpredictable and obstinate loner, the gifted fool and nihilist, to following the path of subordination to the hierarchy and thus attaining peace. He cared nothing for peace, had no regard for the hierarchy, hardly minded reproof and isolation. Certainly he was a most inconvenient and indigestible component in a community whose idea was harmony and orderliness. But because of this very troublesomeness and indigestibility he was, in the midst of such a limpid and prearranged little world, a constant source of vital unrest, a reproach, an admonition and warning, a spur to new, bold, forbidden, intrepid ideas, an unruly, stubborn sheep in the herd.”
― Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

“Everything everyone thinks they know about [Mother Teresa] is false. It must be the single most successful emotional con job of the twentieth century.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“The Devil answer'd: bray a fool in a morter with wheat, yet shall not his folly be beaten out of him; if Jesus Christ is the greatest man, you ought to love him in the greatest degree; now hear how he has given his sanction to the law of ten commandments: did he not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murder'd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defense before Pilate? covet when he pray'd for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments; Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.”
― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: In Full Color

“To be honest, one can only feel glad that so many modern iconoclasts consider Christianity to be full of exceptionally hypocritical, religious zealots - it's biblically accurate and a prophecy fulfilled. The old smoke screen is one of Satan's favorite tricks. He conceals the authentic. He has a persistent strategy of targeting those who remind him of Christianity because he fears those who remind him of Christ.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“Salvation lies not in the faithfulness to forms, but in the liberation from them.”
― Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

“Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to … my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown-instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art. This turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay. It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go.”
― Salman Rushdie

“Artists are agents of chaos. It is the artists
job to encourage entropy, to promote chaos. Idols must be killed, icons crushed, beliefs
shattered. It is the artists job to encourage legitimate, unadulterated, raw thought and
emotion. Art that does nothing new, that simply fills an established role, is not art.
It is a product. A stale, stagnant product of a disgustingly mundane process that has been
done so much it is assumed mandatory. Little different than feces. The last thing the world
needs is to get shittier.”
― Jonathan Culver

“Modernity consists in a revolt against the prevailing style, an unyielding rage against the official order.”
― Irving Howe

“If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.”
― Jonathan Culver

“I tell you, you will not see the new beauty and the truth, until you make up your minds to spit.”
― Kazimir Severinovich Malevich, Essays on art

“I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“While photographs certainly attest to Nazi crimes, the magnitude of Nazi genocide demands that every trace of the regime be forever remembered. The various symbols devised by the Nazi image-makers for the most sophisticated visual identity of any nation are a vivid reminder of the systematic torture and murder engaged in by this totalitarian state. These pictures, signs, and emblems are not merely clip art for contemporary designers to toy with as they please, but evidence of crimes against humanity.”
― Steven Heller, Design Culture: An Anthology of Writing from the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design

“In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.”
― Richard Powers

“Monks congregate like dogs in a kennel,
From contact with their superiors they acquire knowledge,
Is one the course of the wind, is one the water of the sea?
Is one the spark of the fire, of unrestrainable tumult?
Monks congregate like wolves,
From contact with their superiors they acquire knowledge.
They know not when the deep night and dawn divide.
Nor what is the course of the wind, or who agitates it,
In what place it dies away, on what land it roars.”
― Taliesin

“In the late Middle Ages the stupefying simplicity of the heliocentric model was used as an argument to discredit the new astronomy. Its elegance was interpreted as naivete...Just as the legendary inquisitor refused to look through Galileo's telescope, so most modern economists refuse to look at an analysis that might displace the conventional centre of their economic system.”
― Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment and Its Professional Enemies

“When old customs get too stubborn, they don't let the new generation spread it's ideas. So they need to be broken.”
― Shiv Sangal, S

“لا أعرف سبب كون النساء البسيطات أكثر تديناً من غيرهن، بل إن النساء هن الخزان الرئيسي لأشكال التدين البدائية، وقد كن السبب الرئيسي في انتصار بيزنطة على بدعة محطمي الأيقونات، وفي كل الضرائح الدينية تُشاهد النساء أكثر من غيرهن، وتمتلئ الكنائس في الصباحات الباكرة بالنساء المسنات على الدوام.”
― جلجامش نبيل, Gilgamesh Nabeel, صراع الأقنعة

“I don't like peoples, only persons among peoples. I've developed an allergy against being outnumbered, a price for originality.”
― Brian Spellman

“The "peace" which Islam seeks in its arts arises not from hatred of the image, but rather from an alchemical spiritualization or sublimation of the senses. All Islamic art implies an Image, but one that cannot be openly stated: the Image of the One. Islamic art asks us to use our Imagination in an active relation between art-object and viewer, to allow the object to evoke our own creative apperception of Oneness.”
― Peter Lamborn Wilson, Scandal: Essays in Islamic Heresy