Provocative Quotes

The evidence does look like this wasn't just a casual - world leaders don't just pick up the phone and call each other. It does appear that the Donald Trump phone call with the president of Taiwan was a deliberate move, a deliberately provocative move.

Opposition can be useful. Every opposition movement is good and useful if it acts within the law... If there are people who act outside the law, then the state must use legal means to impose law in the interests of the majority. That's the way it's done in the U.S. and that's the way it's done in Russia.

Vampire? Such a provocative word, wrapped in too many clichés and girly novels.

Michel Houellebecq is the most interesting, provocative and important European novelist of my generation. Period. No one else comes close. He has written two or maybe three great books, and his latest, The Map and the Territory, is one of them.

The Playtex Secrets survey truly uncovered some thought-provoking and provocative secrets of real American housewives. In fact, many of the findings would make great fodder for a storyline on the show!

It's still the White House exploding [in "Independence Day"]. It was just so provocative, and no one had ever done it before. I remember when we shot it, how everyone was excited.

Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmidt have gathered together a wide-ranging and provocative set of original essays that successfully demonstrate how contingent the process of making knowledge was during a period of fundamental epistemological change. This is a finely crafted and conceptualized collection.

Finnick?" I say, "Maybe some pants?" He looks down at his legs as if noticing his outfit for the first time. Then he whips off his hospital gown leaving him in just his underwear. "Why? Do you find this" -- he strikes a ridiculously provocative pose -- "distracting?" I laugh. Boggs looks embarrassed and Finnick looks more like the guy I met at the Quarter Quell

A highly cultivated taste, a taste that is knowledgeable and eclectic, is likely to be exciting and provocative, a personal taste at its highest level.

...More than almost any current book, DTU will wake the reader from his dogmatic slumbers. It is eminently readable, challenging, and provocative.

I've consciously tried to be provocative and disturbing.

I want to show people as they are, not glorified, no shame - fat, bulges, wrinkles and all. I want the work to be disturbing, unsettling, provocative, challenging, and thought provoking.

Irene Diamond's Fertile Ground is a provocative book. It stirs me to vigorous assent. It also triggers wide-eyed disbelief. . . . As it prods me to explosions of disagreement, it also provokes useful thought.

Facts are, insurance ratings are really dependent on the notion that some people are higher risk than others.

The democratic choice Russian people made in the early 90's is final.

My insurance provider probably wouldn't allow me to go into a mosh pit anymore. My brain is insured by Lloyd's of London, you know what I'm saying?

Show business is my life. When I was a kid I sold insurance, but nobody laughed.

I don't want to know I'm getting older. Then I'll start to think about getting checkups and insurance. I don't want that.

I like gold because it is a stabilizer; it is an insurance policy.

When someone sets out to be controversial or provocative or shocking as an end in itself, I don't think that's a noble goal.

I know what it's like to have a family and not have insurance and really need it. As a comic, insurance was one of those sacrifices I made early on until I could afford it.

I think that as I continue to write, my writing I hope will become more controversial and more provocative.

Peter Watts has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course. Blindsight is such a book.

It is frequently said that speech that is intentionally provocative and therefore invites physical retaliation can be punished or suppressed. Yet, plainly no such general proposition can be sustained. Quite the contrary.... The provocative nature of the communication does not make it any the less expression. Indeed, the whole theory of free expression contemplates that expression will in many circumstances be provocative and arouse hostility. The audience, just as the speaker, has an obligation to maintain physical restraint.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

Insurance - an ingenious modern game of chance in which the player is permitted to enjoy the comfortable conviction that he is beating the man who keeps the table.

The demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.

I worked in an insurance office for six years, and it was there that I just woke up one day and realised there was something massively lacking in my life, and a non-contributory pension and a subsidised canteen could not fill it.

Herman Cain is out there, he says a lot of provocative things. He said America should build its own Great Wall of China. Cain says it's a great idea because if there's one thing you don't see in China, it's Mexicans.

I know I'm not the greatest singer or dancer, but that doesn't interest me, I'm interested in being provocative and pushing people's buttons.

I do love the prose poem because it's such a perverse and provocative little box - always asking to be questioned, never giving a straight or definitive answer.

It is a fascinating and provocative thought that a body of water deserves to be considered as an organism in its own right.

It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.

Right now, where do we stand? Well right at the Russian border, both sides have been taking provocative actions, both sides are building up military forces. NATO forces are carrying out maneuvers hundreds of yards from the Russian border, the Russian jets are buzzing American jets. Anything could blow up in a minute.

I love beautiful women. I love to show their personality, their sexuality. There's a fashion side to my erotic pictures: I love beautiful shoes and jewellery. But the erotic work I do is too daring and provocative for a fashion magazine. It's more fun, and if you have the right girl who likes it, more exciting, too. It's fashion photography, but with fewer clothes.

It's hard to be understood when addressing many people at once. How can you ever know if you're being understood? So, I've just started being intelligently provocative. And people take the bait.

There are things going on in galleries recently that have shocked me. What I'm going to say is really controversial, but what I find the most provocative is the commerciality of art in general. And the fact that a lot of people have forgotten what the meaning of art is and what the intention behind it is.

To say that war is madness is like saying that sex is madness: true enough, from the standpoint of a stateless eunuch, but merely a provocative epigram for those who must make their arrangements in the world as given.

I have been a provoker and I'll probably always be one in the public arena for the rest of my life.

A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: 'Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?' We must always consider the person.

I think we give Jimmy Carter too much credit to think he knew what was going to happen when he used the word "apartheid." It's provocative, but it was like a nuclear bomb in Israel. And yet that word is used all the time in the Israeli press. There's a double standard there. He probably picked it up in Israel, as it's commonly discussed. I'd be a little surprised if he understood how it was going to be used against him. He doesn't have a highly developed emotional detector. As a politician, that was a weakness.

I remember saying to myself those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that's what art is. Art is about being provocative. Art is also about beauty. And if you leave the latter out, the former doesn't matter.

People think pop is rock, and the lines are getting blurred. Now Rihanna's wearing f-ckin' leather jackets, and it's really annoying . . . (My style is) high-class hooker. I dress for myself. Clearly, it's provocative, but it makes me feel good. And if the only reason it makes someone uncomfortable is because I'm 17, then that person's a scumbag because it shouldn't matter.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus taught his students that what happens to them is not as important as what they believe happens to them. In this engaging and provocative book, Eldon Taylor provides his readers with specific ways in which their beliefs can lead to success or failure in their life undertakings. Each chapter provides nuggets of wisdom as well as road maps for guiding them toward greater self-understanding, balance, responsibility, and compassion.

Patronizing the Arts is a brilliantly nuanced assessment of why universities must become art patrons. Learning from the twentieth-century university's embrace of Big Science, Garber argues that twenty-first-century universities must rigorously devote their attention to Big Art. Provocative, witty, and layered, Patronizing the Arts cogently demonstrates the advantages for both art and the university in this new and radical alliance.

I've always had an interest in the fashion industry. Fashion advertising and lifestyle branding has always been intriguing and provocative to me. It's not just clothing or style that I had interest in, it was more the marketing side of things that I had intrigue in.

This is a major, wide-ranging, and comprehensive book. A philosophical investigation that is also a literary and historical study, Truth and Truthfulness asks how and why we have come to think of accuracy, sincerity, and authenticity as virtues. Bernard Williams' account of their emergence is as detailed and imaginative as his defense of their importance is spirited and provocative. Williams asks hard questions, and gives them straightforward and controversial answers. His book does not simply describe and advocate these virtues of truthfulness; it manifests them.

High-class kitsch may well be "perfect" in its form and and composition: the academic painters were often masters of their craft. Thus, the accusation that a work of kitsch is based not on lack of for or aesthetic merit but on the presence of a particularly provocative emotional content. (The best art, by contrast, eschews emotional content altogether.)

The fabrics I've used in my work are satin and sateen. Sateen is very glossy and far from luxurious. Bright solid colors with too much sheen seem gaudy, pathetic and nostalgia-inducing. Such fabrics are reminiscent of the power of chaos in a shaman's space: overabundant offerings of food on alters, kitschy decorations, provocative shades, vigorous dancing, plaintive singing, absurd fits of crying and laughing, and self-abandonment.

Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.