The Rebel archetype speaks out against discrimination and oppression, challenges injustice, and doesn’t conform.
100 Inspirational Quotes for Rebels
We’ve collected the best quotes about rebels for you to read through.
This selection of quotations are based solely on my personal taste and are in no particular order. You are welcome to browse the entire collection and look for your own favourite quotes.
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Checkout this list of rebel quotes:
1. Emma Watson
I’ve never really had any barrier to break I guess. I don’t really have anything to rebel against. I’m quite lucky.
2. Sharon Horgan
I never felt like I had to rebel against my convent upbringing, because it was comparatively regular.
3. Ruth Messinger
It’s not rebels that make trouble, but trouble that makes rebels.
4. Indira Gandhi
Rebels and non-conformists are often the pioneers and designers of change.
5. Clint Eastwood
There’s a rebel lying deep in my soul. Anytime anybody tells me the trend is such and such, I go the opposite direction. I hate the idea of trends. I hate imitation; I have a reverence for individuality.
6. Walter Isaacson
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently.
6. Michelle Wie
I’m kind of in between a goody-goody and a rebel. I’m not bad, but I’m not good either. I’m a little crazy.
7. Albert Camus
We are rebels for a cause, poets with a dream , and we won’t let this world die without a fight.
8. Albert Camus
In order to exist, man must rebel.
9. Oscar Wilde
Every woman is a rebel, and usually in wild revolt against herself.
10. Angelina Jolie
I’ve been reckless, but I’m not a rebel without a cause.
11. Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Rebels learn the rules better than the rule-makers do. Rebels learn where the holes are, where the rules can best be breached. Become an expert at the rules. Then break them with creativity and style.
12. Anne Douglas Sedgwick
Rebels are the people who refuse the seen for the unseen.
13. Niels Bohr
Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.
14. Criss Jami
Never rebel for the sake of rebelling, but always rebel for the sake of truth.
15. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
The world has only as much power over you as you give it. Rebel. Go beyond duality.
16. Dwight D Eisenhower
Here in America we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.
17. Uta Hagen
To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.
18. Arthur Miller
Try to keep the rebel artist alive in you, no matter how attractive or exhausting the temptation.
19. Sergei Polunin
People are going to think what they want to think. I let them. You can’t control perception. It’s a losing game so I don’t play. I let them lose; lose themselves in their own fantasies of what they want me to be. A rebel, an angel, a romantic, a heart breaker, a boy, a man. Perhaps I am all of those things. Perhaps I’m none. But what I am is for me to find out, not to be dictated to me. It’s for me to know
20. Masha Tupitsyn
True lovers are as rare as true rebels.
21. Thomas Brown
As reason is a rebel to faith, so passion is a rebel to reason.
22. Frank Herbert
When I need to identify rebels, I look for men with principles
23. Marie Lu
If you want to rebel, rebel from inside the system.That’s much more powerful than rebelling outside the system.
24. Henry Steele Commager
We should not forget that our tradition is one of protest and revolt, and it is stultifying to celebrate the rebels of the past … while we silence the rebels of the present.
25. Thomas Paine
Let them call me rebel, and welcome, I feel no concern from it.
26. Ella Wheeler Wilcox
To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.
27. David Bowie
Rebel, rebel, you’ve torn your dress. Rebel, rebel, your face is a mess. Rebel, rebel, how could they know? Hot tramp, I love you so.
28. Dhani Harrison
You don’t have to burn books, you don’t have to rebel against teachers to rebel; to rebel is to truly own your own self.
29. Chaim Potok
Every man who has shown the world the way to beauty, to true culture, has been a rebel, a ‘universal’ without patriotism, without home, who has found his people everywhere.
30. Elvis Presley
I think most people have a natural instinct to rebel.
31. Erich Fromm
The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man’s nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become ”Golems’,’ they will destroy their world and themselves because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life.
32. Quentin Crisp
The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.
33. Johnny Depp
They stick you with those names, those labels — ‘rebel’ or whatever; whatever they like to use. Because they need a label; they need a name. They need something to put the price tag on the back of.
34. Mae West
When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better.
35. Henry Rollins
If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don’t show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.
36. Elsa Peretti
Anyone who was a rebel at one time in life cannot return to being conventional.
37. Thomas Jefferson
A little rebellion now and then… is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.
38. Michelle Rodriguez
Basically I was a rebel growing up. I got kicked out of six schools. But I don’t think that it makes you less of an intellect. You know, if you ever crave knowledge, there’s always a library.
39. Pierre Corneille
Master of the universe but not of myself, I am the only rebel against my absolute power.
40. Sean Penn
Rebel is just as bad a word as maturity.
41. Tupac Shakur
I’m the rebel totally going against the grain. I always want to do the extreme. I want to get as many people looking as possible.
42. Arthur Conan Doyle
My mind rebels at stagnation, give me problems, give me work!
43. Aristotle
Those who excel in virtue have the best right of all to rebel, but then they are of all men the least inclined to do so.
44. Thomas Carlyle
Men seldom, or rather never for a length of time and deliberately, rebel against anything that does not deserve rebelling against.
45. Nicholas Cage
How do you rebel in a family of rebels?
46. Mahatma Gandhi
My whole soul rebels against the idea that Hinduism and Islam represent two antagonistic cultures and doctrines.
47. Richard Dawkins
We have the power to defy the selfish genes of our birth and, if necessary, the selfish memes of our indoctrination. We can even discuss ways of deliberately cultivating and nurturing pure, disinterested altruism – something that has no place in nature, something that has never existed before in the whole history of the world. We are built as gene machines and cultured as meme machines, but we have the power to turn against our creators. We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.
48. Thomas Jefferson
I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
49. Cathy Guisewhite
Defy your own group. Rebel against yourself.
50. Anna Paquin
I have a really, really, really normal family. And by normal I mean we’re all nuts on some level. I think you’ve gotta be a little nuts to pursue any kind of creative job. I was also a really good kid. I know that sounds really dull, but I didn’t rebel in the traditional sense.
51. Kate Winslet
The whole concept of ‘grounding’ children is utterly stupid – they just go off and rebel and don’t like you. When my kids eventually come along, I don’t want them to not like me.
52. Dean Koontz
To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.
53. H.G. Wells
Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.
54. Thomas Paine
He that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to Defender of the Faith, than George the Third.
55. Edward Everett
In conformity with these designs on the city of Washington, and notwithstanding the disastrous results of the invasion of 1862, it was determined by the Rebel government last summer to resume the offensive in that direction.
56. George Orwell
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
57. Jim Morrison
A hero is someone who rebels, or seems to rebel, against the facts of existence and seems to conquer them, but obviously that can work at moments.
58. Stephen Graham
College is the only place where you can rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell you to do.
59. Dennis Hopper
It takes more than going down to the video store and renting “Easy Rider” to be a rebel.
60. Emmeline Pankhurst
I would rather be a rebel than a slave.
61. Lord Byron
Tyranny Is far the worst of treasons. Dost thou deem None rebels except subjects? The prince who Neglects or violates his trust is more A brigand than the robber-chief.
62. Helen Mirren
I’m a would-be rebel. The good girl who’d like to be a bad one.
63. G.K. Chesterton
I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.
64. Tomas Kalnoky
Don’t rebel against the mainstream only to conform to the underground.
65. Mehmet Murat Ildan
Solitude is the rebel of the freedom.
66. Maria Abramovic
We’re destroying the planet, and the planet rebels.
67. Jurnee Smollett
For me, seeing our history told in this light, the ones who did rebel, the ones who did revolt, the revolutionaries, excited me. Seeing this story of the Underground Railroad … and that is such a proud part of our history that not a lot of us know about, where these brave men and women, they were heroes, really helped tear down the system of slavery just by running.
68. C.S. Lewis
Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
69. Seungri
Women like this kind of rebel image in men because there’s a thrill in it, especially for those who are tired and burdened with their lives.
70. C.L.R. James
If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.
71. Taylor Swift
The one place where I’m allowed to rebel, and the one place where I’m allowed to not worry about censoring myself is my music.
72. Pearl S Buck
Upon the profound discontent of the young in every country do I set my faith. I beg you, the young, to be discontented. I pray that you may rebel against what is wrong, not with feeble negative complaining but with strong positive assertion of what is right for all humanity.
73. Yip Harburg
I am a rebel by birth… I contest anything that is unjust, that causes suffering in humanity. My feelings about that are so strong, I don’t think I could live with myself if I weren’t honest.
74. Maya Beiser
I was always a rebel in the sense that I always wanted to go my own road and do something that nobody else has done.
75. Kim Gordon
I mean, who made up all the rules in the culture? Men-white male corporate society. So why wouldnt a woman want to rebel against that?
76. Harold Ramis
My characters aren’t losers. They’re rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else’s rules.
77. George Orwell
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
78. T.B. Joshua
Don’t murmur and rebel in your hour of adversity. Trust in God in every trial.
79. Judah Smith
God’s love is so extravagant and so inexplicable that he loved us before we were us. He loved us before we existed. He knew many of us would reject him, hate him, curse him, rebel against him. Yet he chose to love us. God loves us because he is love.
80. Che Guevara
The monopoly capitalists – even while employing purely empirical methods – weave around art a complicated web which converts it into a willing tool. The superstructure of society ordains the type of art in which the artist has to be educated. Rebels are subdued by its machinery and only rare talents may create their own work. The rest become shameless hacks or are crushed.
81. Michael Crichton
Nobody wants to feel they’re not a rebel.
82. Billy Crystal
I didn’t rebel as a child. I missed that angry teenager thing.
83. Stefan Zweig
As nature requires whirlwinds and cyclones to release its excessive force in a violent revolt against its own existence, so the spirit requires a demonic human being from time to time whose excessive strength rebels against the community of thought and the monotony of moralityonly by looking at those beyond its limits does humanity come to know its own utmost limits.
84. Rollo May
The function of the rebel is to shake the fixated mores of the rigid order of civilization; and this shaking, though painful, is necessary if the society is to be saved from boredom and apathy. Obviously I do not refer to everyone who calls himself a rebel, but only to the authentic rebel. Civilization gets its first flower from the rebel.
85. Frank I Cobb
The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority. It is the one guaranty of human freedom to the American people.
86. William Shakespeare
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.
87. Thomas Jefferson
The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exclusions, and incapacitations are removed.
88. Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
It is only your self-identification with your mind that makes you happy or unhappy. Rebel against your slavery to your mind, see your bonds as self-created and break the chains of attachment and revulsion. Keep in mind your goal of freedom, until it dawns on you that you are already free, that freedom is not something in the distant future to be earned with painful efforts, but perennially one’s own, to be used! Liberation is not an acquisition but a matter of courage, the courage to believe that you are free already and to act on it.
89. Mia
Everyone has that moment where they just rebel
90. Michael S Heiser
Rebellion against God results in being cast out of his service. God doesn’t run the affairs of the spiritual world or our world with rebels on his payroll. They are cast to the Underworld (in the case of the Eden rebel), or a special place in the Underworld (e.g., the offenders of Genesis 6:1-4, who are, to quote Peter and Jude, “kept in chains of gloomy darkness” or “sent to Tartarus”). There are more divine rebels than that in the Bible, but hopefully that scratches the surface enough.
91. Confucius
One who is by nature daring and is suffering from poverty will not long be law-abiding. Indeed, any men, save those that are truly good, if their sufferings are very great, will be likely to rebel.
92. Jim Elliot
Unwillingness to accept God’s ‘way of escape’ from temptation frightens me – what a rebel yet resides within.
93. Constance Markievicz
But while Ireland is not free I remain a rebel, unconverted and unconvertible. There is no word strong enough for it. I am pledged as a rebel, an unconvertible rebel, to the one thing – a free and independent Republic.
94. Samuel Witwer
The thing I love about these Star Wars characters is that I kind of believe we’re all just stewards, temporary caretakers. Darth Maul is Ray Park and Peter Serafinowicz voicing Ray Park, but mostly I think that presence on the screen, that’s what Darth Maul is. When you watch Clone Wars and you watch Rebels, I am contributing to that presence and that character. Sometime in the future, if I’m not right for it and someone else steps in because there’s some move for that character, I completely accept that. I contributed.
95. Lupe Fiasco
Just listening to Pac, ain’t gon’ make it stop
A rebel in your thoughts, ain’t gon’ make it halt
If you don’t become an actor, you’ll never be a factor
96. Al Pacino
Actually, the person I related to was James Dean. I grew up with the Dean thing. Rebel Without A Cause had a very powerful effect on me.
97. Andre Vitchek
The people of Indonesia have to learn, realize, that fighting for a better country is great and inspiring. Like those men, women, and even children in Latin America understood many decades ago! Young people especially, should know: Rebellion is good. Revolution is good. Thinking is good. Progress is good. To be a revolutionary, a rebel, is cool – very cool. Much cooler than driving a red or yellow Ferrari bought with the money your daddy has stolen from the poor!
98. Donald Ray Pollock
I didn’t feel that so much as an outsider when I started writing; I’ve felt that way all my life. I don’t know, man; I guess I was just wired wrong. When I was growing up, I always wanted to be somebody else and live somewhere else. I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable around people. And I’m not trying to romanticize this, because it wasn’t romantic. I wasn’t trying to be a rebel; I just always felt a little out of it. I think that’s why it’s pretty easy for me to identify with people living on the margins.
99. Thomas Gordon
An adolescent does not rebel against her parents. She rebels against their power. If parents would rely less on power and more on nonpower methods to influence their children from infancy on, there would be little for children to rebel against when they become adolescents. The use of power to change the behavior of children, then, has this severe limitation: parents inevitably run out of power, and sooner than they think.
100. Nicole Kidman
In my heart I’m independent, a bit of a rebel, a nonconformist.
