27 Provocation Quotes

The point of poetry is to be acutely discomforting, to prod and provoke, to poke us in the eye, to punch us in the nose, to knock us off our feet, to take our breath away.

'If the Jews want to get it on,' he said, 'tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.'

Hi, my name is Kurt Cobain, I'm homosexual, I'm a pagan, I'm a drug abuser, and I like to fuck pot-bellied pigs! (12/02/91 at Newcastle, UK)

It is not wise warfare to throw your ammunition to the enemy unless you throw it from the cannon's mouth. But if you can compel the enemy to waste his ammunition by drawing his fire on some thoroughly protected spot; if you can, by annoying and goading and harassing him in all possible ways, drive him to the last resort of stripping bare his tyrannous and invasive purposes and put him in the attitude of a designing villain assailing honest men for purposes of plunder; there is no better strategy.

Samuel L. Jackson :(to a white man drinking Samuel Jackson Beer) How does it taste, muthafucka!?

On the way to the movies someone called me Mr. Murder before flashing a camera in my face. It made me wanna go on a killing spree a little bit.

(after playing 'Sanctuary' by Vex) - That's Vex and on the back of the sleeve it says 'four individuals with no set ideals making music to provoke thought' - and the thought which most immediately comes to me is that it's almost time that we've had enough records like that.

[Israel] must see the sword as the main, if not the only, instrument with which to keep its morale high and to retain its moral tension. Toward this end it may, no - it must - invent dangers, and to do this it must adopt the method of provocation-and-revenge...

He jumped to the sky with anger about Hebron and the provocation of Levinger that has become such a tragedy.

Moshe Dayan unfolded one plan after another for direct action. The first - what should be done to force open blockade of the Gulf of Eilat. A ship flying the Israeli flag should be sent, and if the Egyptians bomb it, we should bomb the Egyptian base from the air, or conquer Ras al-Naqb, or open our way south of Gaza Strip to the coast. There was a general uproar. I asked Moshe: Do you realize that this would mean war with Egypt?, he said: Of course.

Two altogether opposed political stances can each draw an audience's attention. One is to be politically consistent, but nonetheless original in one's insights; the other, an inchoate form of apostasy, is to bank on the shock value of an occasional, wildly inconsistent outburst. The former approach, which Chomsky exemplifies, requires hard work, whereas the latter is a lazy substitute for it. ... The master at this pose of maverick unpredictability used to be Christopher Hitchens. Amidst a fairly typical leftist politics, he would suddenly ambush unsuspecting readers with his opposition to abortion, admiration of the misogynist and juvenile lyrics of Two Live Crew ('I think that's very funny'), or support for Columbus's extermination of Native Americans ('deserving to be celebrated with great vim and gusto'). Immediately the talk of the town became, 'Did you read Hitchens this week?' Although a tacit assumption equates unpredictability with independence of mind, it might just as well signal lack of principle.

Along the Syria border there were no farms and no refugee camps - there was only the Syrian army... The kibbutzim saw the good agricultural land ... and they dreamed about it... They didn't even try to hide their greed for the land... We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn't possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn't shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance further, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that's how it was...The Syrians, on the fourth day of the war, were not a threat to us.

I think that I say those things that make people so angry, not because I really mean them, but because I simply thought of a clever way to say them. It's a kind of art, to think of the perfect way to say and idea, and when you think of it then you have to say it, because words don't exist until you say them A pretty feeble kind of art, Nyef, and I say you should give it up before it gets you killed

You know something? I'm sorry that you didn't get raped.

Now I'm a fag and I'm gonna have my skull sexed. Anything else gentlemen?

Did you hit the retard?

'Mike Awesome, get your pussy ass out here so I can kick your ass!'

Good art bristles with razor blades.

'So Austin's gonna put you over his knee. Lift up your little skirt. I gotta be careful, I don't want your balls to fall out!' (To Stephanie)