Top 100 Shocking Quotes
#1. In 1895, Ann Strong declared in the Minneapolis Tribune that bicycles were "just as good company as most husbands" and that when a bicycle gets shabby or old a woman could "dispose of it and get a new one without shocking the entire community.
Frances E. Willard
#2. I really enjoy squeezing out a big lump of paint directly onto the canvas and leaving it; fresh, immediate and sometimes shocking.
John Dyer
#3. Smoking is a shocking thing - blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us.
Samuel Johnson
#5. There's a natural depravity in inanimate things that's quite shocking, when you think of it.
Josephine Pinckney
#6. The "difficult" female character can-and will-do the shocking, the unexpected and, as a consequence, will give your story an immediate jolt of energy. She is the character who doesn't fit the mold.
Jane Heller
#7. Sometimes it's possible to see misfortune coming and prepare for it, I guess, but most of the time, when a person disappears, it's as unexpected and shocking as hail in the middle of June.
Tiffany Baker
#8. There is something almost shocking in the notion of so chaste a function carrying this Kantian hurlyburly in her womb.
William James
#9. Nature has hardly formed a woman ugly enough to be insensible to flattery upon her person; if her face is so shocking that she must in some degree be conscious of it, her figure and her air, she trusts, make ample amends for it.
Bill Vaughan
#10. That is the kind of shocking accessibility conveyed in Jesus' word Abba. God may be the Sovereign Lord of the Universe, but through his Son, God has made himself as approachable as any doting human father.
Philip Yancey
#12. It's not enough to say it's shocking, it's appalling, and to condemn only individual acts. We need to challenge and bring down the tribal honor-and-shame culture as codified in the Islamic religion.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
#13. Her tiny hand gripped mine with a surprising warmth, and in a shocking wash of emotion, I felt everything I knew shift. The scent of cinnamon and baby powder hit me, and as my eyes widened, my heart melted, making room for her.
Kim Harrison
#14. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap.
Alan Moore
#15. Im extremely honest, and I pride myself on it. I dont try to be shocking. Im playful, and I know when something Im saying is maybe shocking, but its just the truth, I never wanted to be scary to people or upsetting to people. I simply want to live the way I need to live.
Angelina Jolie
#16. I've been watching 'Walking Dead' with my son, and there is absolutely nothing in there I find shocking, but it's cool, and I like it.
Mads Mikkelsen
#17. Gory stuff can be shocking but it doesn't really scare me. I'd say the kind of stuff that gets under my skin is the unknown. You hear a knock behind a wall and you don't know what it is. Is there something there or not?
Oren Peli
#18. One reason you are stricken when your parents die is that the audience you've been aiming at all your life - shocking it, pleasing it - has suddenly left the theater.
Katharine Whitehorn
#19. It is genuinely shocking to me that I'm on a television show.
Chris Hayes
#20. It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.
Henry A. Wallace
#21. I'm always really surprised by people who are comfortable revealing all of their secrets on TV or in a magazine. It's actually quite shocking to me.
Annabella Sciorra
#22. Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
E.B. White
#23. Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Susan Sontag
#24. I talk a lot about strength, faith and love, but I don't ever talk about the fact that I am one of the most sensitive people in my family. That might be the most shocking, because you always see me fighting the good fight, with the strong face on, but I am the most emotional.
Monica
#25. R.I.P. Alexander McQueen, a kind soul and brilliant creative genius. Sad and shocking. You've touched us all.
Joe Zee
#26. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it's likely to harm them.
Noam Chomsky
#27. I was speechless. Rare for me, but if anyone was capable of shocking me to silence, it was my mother.
Robyn Peterman
#28. Loss is the shocking catalyst of transformation.
Aspen Matis
#29. As if being a former vampire drone in a werewolf household were not shocking enough, the maid then opened her mouth and proved that she was also, quite reprehensibly, French.
Gail Carriger
#30. What is shocking and wrong is not [Lord Devlin's] idea that the community's morality counts, but his idea of what counts as the community's morality.
Ronald Dworkin
#31. We're all taught from a young age that there are only two choices: pink or blue, Bratz or Power Rangers, cheerleading or football. We see gender in two dimensions because that's what society has taught us from birth. But, are you ready for a shocking revelation?
SOCIETY NEEDS TO CHANGE.
Jeff Garvin
#32. Also, in the category of 'obvious but still shocking,' an animal called a 'killer whale' killed someone who was trying to play with it. Now, no one knows exactly what enraged the whale, but earlier in the week, it had been thrown off a flight by Southwest Airlines.
Bill Maher
#33. I find it shocking that anybody can be brought down in D.C. for gossip, ostensibly. I thought that was the coin of the realm there. That's like getting hit with lightning on a cloudless day.
Dennis Miller
#34. I had, in my legal practice, often encountered really shocking examples of the devastating impact of the costs of long-term medical care on meagre incomes. And, just before I was elected, I had my own personal experience in paying very considerable bills for my mother's terminal illness.
Judy LaMarsh
#35. That's what art is, shocking people. Sometimes shocking yourself.
Willow Smith
#36. It was shocking to realize how much of investigation was just brute-force solutions.
James S.A. Corey
#37. I think it is shocking that 15- and 16-year-olds leave school unable to add up and with the reading ability of a four-year-old.
Joan Collins
#38. I had slept nothing all night, making ghosts for myself, filling my mind with them and giving myself pale frights. All the ghosts had a different punishment for me, some of them shocking indeed.
Richard Llewellyn
#39. The most shocking act, closely examined, is just a louder version of some habitual gesture.
Susan Choi
#40. It is simply not possible to live in a state of acute fear and shock for more than a couple of weeks, and so the mind finds a path, a story, a way onwards. Shock is by definition transient, even when the shocking thing is here to stay.
Sarah Moss
#41. I got into trouble a while ago for saying that I thought the internet led to increased literacy - people scolded me about the shocking grammar to be found online - but I was talking about fundamentals: quite simply, you can't use the net unless you can read.
Margaret Atwood
#42. When all the normal patterns and routines of a person's life fell apart - and with such shocking suddenness - you had to find something you could hold onto, something that was both sane and predictable.
Stephen King
#43. We watched some of the movie. It was shocking. Sex is apparently hard labor. Various persons supported crushing weights in agonizing positions for what seemed like endless blocks of time. Exhausted men grunted and toiled like movers trying to get a refrigerator into a fifth floor walk-up.
Russell Baker
#44. The single most frustrating and saddening aspect of human life is its shocking brevity.
Sean DeLauder
#45. Like journalists. The police have an extremely sick sense of humor, very guarded, very private, very male, which they need to survive on an everyday level. I don't think anyone has ever managed to tap that on the screen - it would actually be too shocking.
Helen Mirren
#46. When Bird came on the scene, it was just as shocking as in the Bible: everything was dark, and then the light appeared for the first time.
Shorty Rogers
#47. There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.
Ray Dalio
#48. The pressure to conform to an authority figure or peer group can cause people to behave in shocking ways.
Mike Lofgren
#49. That was the shocking part. Here we were in the midst of everything and this potentially giant story was being told and virtually noone was there.
Robert A. M. Stern
#50. The Thickety is a sinister, magical debut with a marvelous and shocking heroine. J.A. White's elegant writing and masterful plot kept me turning pages late into the night.
Lisa McMann
#51. Tej seemed such a sunny personality, much of the time
these flashes of dark were like a crack in the sky, shocking and wrong. Reminding him that the daylight was the illusion, the scattering of light by the atmosphere, and the endless night was the permanent default behind it all.
Lois McMaster Bujold
#52. [Allen] Ginsberg totally helped that out. He was the best sales person. He was the most pop. They are still shocking and relevant, especially [William] Burroughs.
Yony Leyser
#53. I can't say I'm happy to be talking about John Ritter and his passing. In my 21 years of Entertainment Tonight, this really was one of the most shocking and sad things to have happened.
Mary Hart
#54. Catharsis isn't art. You can't rely on catharsis to get a laugh. Because guess what? People do laugh when something's shocking, but that is, to me, the absolute fakest of laughs. That's not something that sustains a television series, or a movie, or even 45 minutes of a stand-up set at Carolines.
Mindy Kaling
#55. Frank Farrelly ... must be thought of with respect (perhaps even delight?) by his clients who have so far played the game of therapy with their therapists, but, I am afraid, also a shocking example for those therapists who, in Laing's words, 'are playing at not playing a game'.
Paul Watzlawick
#56. People are motivated by the desires for privilege, for power, for profit. Those are not shocking revelations. Anyone who's had any experience in life knows these things.
Norman Finkelstein
#57. The presentation of hard core pornography, brutality and shocking language, from what I hear, is leaving the public jaded and tired of this kind of film.
Pola Negri
#58. When I watch 'Mad Men' and I see the patronising attitudes to women that are so shocking for all of us to watch now, I feel that I've lived and see the same evolution in this regard around disability.
Aimee Mullins
#59. The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday's election is that the Democrats didn't do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.
Frank Rich
#60. It was shocking to realize how many low-income Americans don't have savings accounts.
Dan Ariely
#61. If you're going to be a wannabe, make sure you 'wannabe' something great. The most shocking thing about wannabes, is they largely want to be something irrelevant, vein, or just plain petty.
Andrew Williams
#62. It was really shocking to me that when I was dating a dude I could get married and my taxes were 8 grand less, blah blah blah.
Sia Furler
#63. I think it's ridiculous that we even have to talk about gay rights as rights ... It's gonna be as shocking as the treatment of slaves someday.
Regina Spektor
#64. My most famous drama in England is quite controversial. It's something called Men Only, and it's rather a shocking exploration of male sexuality.
Peter Webber
#65. There is an angel inside me whom I am constantly shocking.
Jean Cocteau
#66. [H]is 'philosophy' seemed to consist of anything that would be particularly annoying to the powers that be without being so shocking that they would fire him. He got the reputation among the students as an original and a rebel without having to pay the penalty for actually being either.
Orson Scott Card
#67. Nothing can be more shocking and horrid than one of our kitchens sprinkled with blood, and abounding with the cries of expiring victims or with the limbs of dead animals scattered or hung up here and there.
Alexander Pope
#68. It is fine for a woman to know a lot; but I don't want her to have this shocking desire to be learned for learnedness sake. When I ask a woman a question, I like her to pretend to ignore what she really knows.
Moliere
#69. Volumnia hastens to express her opinion that the shocking people ought to be tried as traitors, and made to support the Party.
Charles Dickens
#70. My mom and I have always been very close since she did raise me as, like, a single mom. My friends and everyone I know are like, 'Wow, you guys really have a really good relationship.' She's with me a lot of the time, so people find that kind of shocking.
Tiffany Trump
#71. In this manner, I continued with Satan for ten days. His answer and blasphemy were too shocking to pen; till I was worn out with rage and malice against him, I could not bear myself.
Joanna Southcott
#72. It's actually shocking to me how hard it's been to get back into the movie business.
Lea Thompson
#73. The way we allow children to be advertised to is shocking. Eating is a learned behavior, and we've made these kids sitting ducks for all the bad messages about industrialized food. The fact that we allow that to go on is horrifying.
Ruth Reichl
#74. When the electric dog finally stopped shocking him, Mack Sullivan lay outstretched on the cold concrete, pretending he was unable to move.
Hugo Krait
#75. I should be arguing vehemently with doctors, demanding results, I should be surrounded by people who are bleeding and screaming and shocking one another with defibrillators.
Dan Chaon
#76. It's shocking we don't see more engineers and entrepreneurs interested in enterprise.
Jim Goetz
#77. Oys by civil calculations, we had by now roughed up the swami and slept where the elephant shits, Shocking us would have required some kind of genius.
Woe To Live On
Daniel Woodrell
#79. Despair gives the shocking ease to the mind that a mortification gives to the body.
Sir Fulke Greville
#80. Brilliant ... Marriage Confidential is both laugh-out-loud funny and gasp-out-loud shocking, and nothing less than a Feminine Mystique for our time. Mark my words, your marriage will change after reading this book.
Debby Applegate
#81. In this country we're just obsessed with making people celebrities before they've even done anything, which I think is just shocking.
Kelly Brook
#82. In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way.
Edwidge Danticat
#83. History loved to lie, through simple distortion or complete fabrication. Lies were the cosmetics of history, and when history could not be beautiful, it preferred to be shocking.
Sean DeLauder
#84. They were just kind of simultaneous - the film ending and the sets being destroyed. I was struck the first time I saw the Great Hall become a big pile of burning rubble and getting scattered around. It's really quite shocking for the fans.
Rupert Grint
#85. Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free. So often sleep brought dreams of him.
Bernard Taylor
#86. I think we're in a post-pornographic time and nothing seems shocking, but everything remains carnal no matter what you do.
David LaChapelle
#87. We never really tried to shock for shock's sake on 'Family Guy'. If something was horribly offensive and shocking, we would put it in if it was also hysterically funny.
Seth MacFarlane
#88. 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.
Rob Bell
#89. We get these really deep and emotional fan letters sometimes that are so heartbreaking or shocking or haunting sometimes that I can kind of relate to them in my own way and connect with our fans in that way.
Vic Fuentes
#90. I think that what's funny is that I seem to be taking up the roles that I remember my dad having - for some reason, I'm the one who makes the coffee, and my dad was always that guy. It's kind of shocking how closely I compare to my dad.
James Mercer
#91. What's shocking is cruelty and torture, and that's become our entertainment. Kids can play violent video games, but God forbid they look at a naked woman. That's pornography, that's perverse. No!
David LaChapelle
#92. The shocking truth is that until recently most people didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with genocide, as long as it didn't happen to them.
Steven Pinker
#93. People assume I'm a boiler ready to explode, but I actually have very low blood pressure, which is shocking to people.
Donald Trump
#94. Edward in the sunlight was shocking. I couldn't get used to it, though I'd been staring at him all afternoon. His skin, white despite the faint flush from yesterday's hunting trip, literally sparkled, like thousands of tiny diamonds were embedded in the surface.
Stephenie Meyer
#95. I don't like that particular word 'shocking.' I'm looking for the unexpected. I'm looking for things I've never seen before ... I was in a position to take those pictures. I felt an obligation to do them.
Robert Mapplethorpe
#96. It is a shocking trick for a young person to be always lolling upon a sofa.
Jane Austen
#97. Oh. To be filled with goodness then shattered by goodness, so beautifully mosaically fragmented by such shocking goodness.
Ali Smith
#98. I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.
Camille Paglia
#99. It's hard to express how profound it is to have your experience broadcast back to you for the first time, how shocking it feels to be acknowledged, as if your own sense of realness had only existed before as a concept.
Carrie Brownstein
#100. I find that the majority of the year, I don't spend acting. I spend it either writing or editing or producing, or putting things together. So it's as shocking as it is tragic. I really enjoy it. It's a valuable skill set. I certainly feel like more of a grownup.
Charlie Day
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