What's the difference between revolutionary and subversive?

Revolutionary


Definition:

  • (a.) Of or pertaining to a revolution in government; tending to, or promoting, revolution; as, revolutionary war; revolutionary measures; revolutionary agitators.
  • (n.) A revolutionist.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Sheez, I thought, is that what the revolutionary spirit of 1789 and 1968 has come to?
  • (2) This is not for the most part revolutionary.” Trump has made some of his least ideological picks in the area of national security and foreign policy.
  • (3) Unless you are part of some Unite-esque scheme to join up as part of a grand revolutionary plan, why would you bother shelling out for a membership card?
  • (4) We have learned that only a revolutionary approach – one that unites revolutionary forces from across the political spectrum – will succeed in rebuilding our country.
  • (5) "We have Revolutionary Guards who defied orders, though they were severely punished, expelled from the force and taken to prison," he says.
  • (6) Aware that her press secretary, Bernard Ingham, a former labour correspondent for the Guardian who understood the range of attitudes within trade unions, had tried to soften the impression that she saw Kinnock as another General Galtieri [Argentina’s president during the Falklands war], the draft text tried to distinguish between unions, rival parties and what the final text (the one she actually delivered) called “an organised revolutionary minority” with their “outmoded Marxist dogma about class warfare”.
  • (7) Trierweiler has broken a fundamental principle of French political life, an unwritten law inherited from the Ancien Régime and perpetuated by France's revolutionary nomenklatura, that the private life – and by that I mean sex life – of a public figure must remain inviolable.
  • (8) The Sunni side includes ISIS, Jaish al-Islam, JRTN, the 1920s Revolutionary Brigades, and moderate Sunni Arab tribal members.
  • (9) Like them, Benjamin is not a revolutionary; he doesn't want to make a new, more free or equitable society.
  • (10) Rouhani said on Saturday that Iran had never dispatched any forces to Iraq and it was very unlikely it ever would, but Qassem Suleimani, commander of the Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was in Baghdad last week to give advice to Maliki.
  • (11) Played out against the backdrop of the 1979 hostage crisis, Argo spins the account of a joint Hollywood-CIA mission to spring six imperiled Americans from revolutionary Iran, using a fake movie production as a decoy.
  • (12) It is a conflict over ownership of the process of revolutionary change, one that has already brought violence back to Egypt's streets – and which Fahmy's project is wading straight into the middle of.
  • (13) Central to the whole project was a patient fascination with religion, represented, in particular, in his attempt to understand the revolutionary power of puritanism.
  • (14) After dismissing the ending of Revolutionary Road as "falsely bleak" and telling his audience that "there's something goofy about American literature since modernism came to an end", the celebrated author of Freedom and The Corrections moved on to social media .
  • (15) Its failure first motivated cultural nationalists, socialists, anarchists and revolutionaries across Europe, before seeding many anti-colonial movements in Asia and Africa.
  • (16) The Nuit debout has some aspects of a May 68 for the internet age, but with a major difference: the revolutionary students of half a century ago came of age during the trente glorieuses , the 30 glorious years of postwar economic growth, and wanted to crack open a conservative society; those of 2016 are, on the contrary, the children of 30 years of high unemployment, economic gloom and disenchantment with the way representative democracy works.
  • (17) They could be playing these people – Morales, Chesimard – off as pawns.” While Cuba was once an attractive destination for criminals, revolutionaries and skyjackers – 34 of 62 American plane hijackers flew to Cuba in 1969 – Fidel Castro lost patience with the swarm as early as the 70s.
  • (18) Apple has used the month of January to launch revolutionary products before, in part as a way of diverting attention from its rivals presenting their latest inventions at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which Apple does not attend, and that takes place the same month.
  • (19) These faux pas by the Institutional Revolutionary party candidate, famous for his good looks and telenovela star wife, at the international literary festival in Guadalajara, left Mexico's social and mainstream media buzzing with mockery.
  • (20) There's a deep tradition in Russia of gender and revolution – we've had amazing women revolutionaries."

Subversive


Definition:

  • (a.) Tending to subvert; having a tendency to overthrow and ruin.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) After heading for Rome with his long-term partner, Howard Auster, he returned to fiction with a bestselling novel, Julian, based on the life of a late Roman emperor; a political novel, Washington DC, based on his own family; and Myra Breckinridge, a subversive satire that examined contradictions of gender and sexuality with enough comic brio to become a worldwide bestseller.
  • (2) In the three cases examined, the panel said that none "represents subversion of the peer review process nor unreasonable attempts to influence the editorial policy of journals".
  • (3) Beijing is furious at the Nobel committee's decision to give the award to Liu, who is serving an 11-year sentence for incitement to subversion for co-authoring Charter 08, an appeal for democratic reforms.
  • (4) Zhou Shifeng, the founder of Beijing’s Fengrui law firm and one of the lawyers at the centre of the crackdown, is accused of “state subversion”.
  • (5) Yet the whole thing was sly and subversive, for it whispered, see, see what you have been missing.
  • (6) It is likely that this process involves subversion of the normal regulatory mechanisms which control expression of proto-oncogenes through the interposition of exogenous, cis-acting enhancer sequences.
  • (7) They were subversive, and they hung out together and watched films.” It meant a lot to her, because until then she had never heard staff talk about the Connor his parents knew and loved.
  • (8) According to state media, he began serving a three-year sentence for subversion last month.
  • (9) His political activism earned him a 10-year jail term for "subversive speech", after which he fled to neighbouring Mozambique to lead guerrilla forces in a protracted war against Ian Smith's government that left 27,000 dead.
  • (10) Where there were pictures of powerful women, the images tended to be subversive: the same photograph of a grimacing Theresa May was used to illustrate three different stories about the home secretary, and two of the three pictures of the German chancellor showed Angela Merkel puffing out her cheeks, looking mildly absurd.
  • (11) One man – Guo Xianliang, an engineer from Yunnan Province – is detained on suspicion of inciting subversion of state power after distributing flyers about Liu and the prize in Guangdong, southern China, the organisation reported.
  • (12) People who are now mainstream politicians were, at their start of their political careers, deemed to be subversive by the Special Branch - to name one: Jack Straw.
  • (13) The "political subversion" consisted of support for those resisting the murderous assaults of the US and its client regimes, and sometimes – horror of horrors – perhaps even providing arms to the victims.
  • (14) O'Brien has since become notorious among equal rights campaigners for his vigorous attacks on gay marriage and gay adoptions , calling homosexuality a "grotesque subversion" and "harmful to the physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing of those involved".
  • (15) Kenton's alliance with Zaleshoff isn't always an easy one - the journalist is unimpressed by the spy's attempt to fob him off with the official Stalinist line on Trotskyite subversion, for example, and Zaleshoff is, not unreasonably, suspicious of Kenton's motives for helping him - but it's kept afloat by the undercurrent of sexual attraction between Kenton and Zaleshoff's sister.
  • (16) Warp's next act of subversion was to wind up Pete Tong by declaring that bleep was dead and that the future of music was "clonk" - the title of Sweet Exorcist's next 12in.
  • (17) "I love the making of a book, I love the clash between commerce and art and the subversive quality of thinking, right, if you talk about this book in a certain way you can get it in people's hands."
  • (18) Microorganisms implement their strategy of persistence by two principal tactics: (1) sabotage of the host's bronchial defenses (ie, direct microbe-mediated damage to the host), and (2) subversion of the host's normally protective defenses into damaging host tissue itself (ie, indirect host-mediated damage provoked by the microbe).
  • (19) The "final definition" of the program recognized that "final success will require decisive US military intervention," after terrorism and subversion had laid the basis.
  • (20) So the battles of the last century that were considered subversive at the time, have largely been won.