I've said that anyone who doesn't contradict himself is a…

Everyone is a reactionary about subjects he understands.

— Robert Conquest

“Revolution is progressivist and seeks the strengthening of the state; rebellion is reactionary and seeks its disappearance. The revolutionary is a potential government official;…

— Nicolás Gómez Dávila

An artist must be a reactionary

— Evelyn Waugh

An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems…

— Lion Feuchtwanger

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…

— Michel Houellebecq

Empirical debunking cannot reach the deepest fear of the reactionary mind, which is that the state - that devouring leviathan - will soon swallow…

— Rick Perlstein

A reactionary revolution is nothing but a high-speed evolution backwards!

— Mehmet Murat Ildan

“Kings may usurp thrones, republics may be established, but the town scarcely stirs. Plassan sleeps while Paris fights.”

— Émile Zola

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

— Evelyn Waugh

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…

— Patrick Soon-Shiong

To make things 'perfectly clear' is reactionary and stupefying. The real is not perfectly clear.

— Avital Ronell

It's a constant process for me to learn to take the time to really understand what hurt me and how best to address it…

— Laura Regan

“Reactionary movements often mistake what they're trying to take down.”

— A. Cretan

Any movement in history which attempts to perpetuate itself, becomes reactionary.

— Josip Broz Tito

There are judges who stretch the law... to suit reactionary attitudes.

— Michael Foot