revolt against

revolt against (someone or something)

1. To rise up in rebellion against some person or group of authority; to attempt to overthrow the leader of a country or its government. After years of despotic rule, the citizens finally united as one to revolt against the tyrannical dictator. A number of countries have begun revolting against the empire.
2. To stand up against or defiantly reject someone or something. Large businesses across the country have been revolting against the new corporation tax, which has sent the country's economy into a tailspin. Workers are revolting against the cut to their pensions.
3. To refuse to work correctly for someone or something. As my motor neuron disease progressed, my body began revolting against me. I wore contacts for nearly 20 years with no issue, until one day my eyes simply revolted against me. Now I can't wear them without them a great deal of painful irritation.
See also: revolt
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

revolt against someone or something

to rebel or rise against someone or something. The citizens were gathering arms, preparing to revolt against the government.
See also: revolt
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of American Idioms and Phrasal Verbs.
See also:
  • revolt
  • revolt against (someone or something)
  • try back
  • try someone back
  • try someone back again
  • make a play for
  • make a play for (someone or something)
  • make a play for somebody/something
  • make a play for someone
  • make a play for something
References in classic literature
Secondly and thirdly we may ascribe the rise of the new epic to the nature of the Boeotian people and, as already remarked, to a spirit of revolt against the old epic.
With an inward agony, with a flaming, outspoken revolt against the ways of Nature, she witnessed the scene of torture.
"Friends, fellow-citizens, and girls!" she said; "we are about to begin our great Revolt against the men of Oz!
Byron (George Gordon Byron) expresses mainly the spirit of individual revolt, revolt against all existing institutions and standards.
Not many leagues from here is a tribe of Jews whose ancestors fled thither after an unsuccessful revolt against King David, and these their descendants are still under a ban and keep to themselves.
By some mysterious influence which she was unable to trace, the boisterous merriment of the two girls had roused in her a sense of revolt against the life that she was leading.
In noveldom woman still sets the moral standard, and to her the males, who are in full revolt against the acceptance of the infatuation of a pair of lovers as the highest manifestation of the social instinct, and against the restriction of the affections within the narrow circle of blood relationship, and of the political sympathies within frontiers, are to her what she calls heartless brutes.
Every see-saw of her breath, every wave of her blood, every pulse singing in her ears, was a voice that joined with nature in revolt against her scrupulousness.
At that time Ireland was filled with storm and anger, with revolt against English rule, with strife among the Irish nobles themselves.
And to think that these people had been upon the point of instituting a revolt against the bailiff through impatience to hear his work!
[1] In August 1791, as a consequence of the French Revolution, the black slaves and mulattoes on Haiti rose in revolt against the whites, and in the period of turmoil that followed enormous cruelties were practised by both sides.
{Duchesse d'Angouleme = Marie Therese Charlotte, the Dauphine, Adrienne's patron; her sister = her sister-in-law Marie Caroline, Duchesse de Berry, who led an unsuccessful revolt against the new regime}
She might believe herself wholly in revolt against it; but what had charmed her in it would still charm her, even though it were against her will.
It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man--man who is the most restless of life, ever in revolt against the dictum that all movement must in the end come to the cessation of movement.
Her insular notions of propriety rose in perpetual revolt against Pesca's constitutional contempt for appearances; and she was always more or less undisguisedly astonished at her mother's familiarity with the eccentric little foreigner.