Quotes & Sayings About Shock Value

I don't like the phrase shock value. Surprise is essential in comedy, and if people are shocked by what I consider merely surprising, then that's their shock. But there is no joke without surprise. — George Carlin

Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery. — John L'Heureux

Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork. — Camille Paglia

I've been offered nymphomaniacs, kleptomaniacs, pyromaniacs, homicidal maniacs and just plain maniacs. I think producers felt that after playing a long series of noble and admirable characters there would be quite a lot of shock value in seeing me play something altogether different. But I prefer upbeat stories that send people out of the theater feeling better than they did coming in. It's my cup of tea. — Greer Garson

Women don't want to exchange places with men. Male chauvinists, science-fiction writers and comedians may favor that idea for its shock value, but psychologists say it is a fantasy based on ruling-class ego and guilt. — Gloria Steinem

You approve?" I asked, spinning around.
He slipped an arm around my waist. "Unfortunately, yes. I was hoping you'd show up in something a lot sluttier. Something that would scandalize my parents."
"Sometimes it's like you don't even care about me as a person," I observed as we walked inside. "It's like you're just using me for shock value."
"It's both, little dhampir. I care about you, and I'm using you for shock value. — Richelle Mead

When art becomes merely shock value, our sense of humanity is slowly degraded. — Roger Scruton

Some people think that my shows are just for shock value, but the provocation makes those classic pieces look different every six months. You don't need to see the same gray suit every season. But surrounding it with 40 really interesting ideas makes it feel new. — Thom Browne

Please don't be too prejudiced against the poor thing because she's a liar. I do really believe that, like so many liars, there is a real substratum of truth behind her lies. I mean that though, to take an instance, her atrocity stories have grown and grown until every kind of unpleasant story that has ever appeared in print has happened to her or her relations personally, she did have a bad shock initially and did see one, at least, of her relations killed. I think a lot of these displaced persons feel, perhaps justly, that their claim to our notice and sympathy lies in their atrocity value and so they exaggerate and invent. — Agatha Christie

An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long. — Robert Longo

Mom says the FCC is responsible for inventing cuss words just for media shock value. She says if everyone would just use them enough, they wouldn't be considered cuss words anymore, and no one would ever be offended by them." This kid is hard to keep up with! "Your mother encourages you to cuss?" Gavin says. Kiersten nods. "I don't see it that way. It's more like she's encouraging us to undermine a system flawed through overuse of words that are made out to be harmful, when in fact they're just letters, mixed together like every other word. That's all they are, mixed-up letters. — Colleen Hoover

You don't need shock value things to make a movie successful. — Haylie Duff

We must face the fact that society is founded on intolerance. [ ... ] We may prate of toleration as we will; but society must always draw a line somewhere between allowable conduct and insanity or crime, in spite of the risk of mistaking sages for lunatics and saviours for blasphemers. We must persecute, even to the death; and all we can do to mitigate the danger of persecution is, first, to be very careful what we persecute, and second, to bear in mind that unless there is a large liberty to shock conventional people, and a well informed sense of the value of originality, individuality, and eccentricity, the result will be apparent stagnation covering a repression of evolutionary forces which will eventually explode with extravagant and probably destructive violence. — George Bernard Shaw

That's what you strive for - you strive to take your move to the next level. It's about shock value, always shock value, but keeping it flavor and stylized and making it yours. — Crazy Legs

When I'm naked, I really like to do push-ups. No. I think I really tackle it like everything else. If you're going to commit yourself to playing something, you have to be able to understand it. If you can understand it, then you can do it and go balls out with it. But, I've never been in a position where I've been like, "This doesn't feel right." I wouldn't do it, if it was that. I like the shock value of it. I think that, if you use it correctly, it's pretty effective, as long as I'm lit really, really, really well. — Charlize Theron

It's funny how something so normal and mundane that you see every day-your body-can be controversial. The shock value is intense. It's like carrying an art piece around with you all the time. — Beth Ditto

When I was 11, I had an episode in my life. I saw my cousin shoot his wife. It wasn't traumatic ... but the shock value. I went back into the apartment to collect some things with my dad, because my cousin was in jail. The bed was all bloody. It was there where she had landed after the bullet. She got a .38 to the face. — Richard Ramirez

He was a noisy robust little man with a gleam of real talent concealed in the messy obscurity of his verse. But because he did his best to shock people with his monstrous mass of otiose words (he was the inventor of the "submental grunt" as he called it), his main output seems now so nugatory, so false, so old-fashioned (super-modern things have a queer knack of dating much faster than others) that his true value is only remembered by a few scholars who admire the magnificent translations of English poems made by him at the very outset of his literary career, - — Vladimir Nabokov

Time had eroded all shock value. — Robert Galbraith

I hated Shallow Grave, that movie made me angry. And I hated Happiness. I generally hate movies that use extreme violence or gratuitous shock value in place of having a heart. For example: movies that combine extremely sadistic violence with humor I find offensive. — Jesse Michaels

My reasons for declaring a sexual preference had to do less with the pursuit of personal freedom than with the lust for pure shock value. — Lance Loud

When I was three, my dad thought it would be hilarious to teach me swear words, then have me say them to his friends. They would laugh and laugh. I realize now the laugh was pure shock value, but it felt really good, and I've been chasing it ever since. — Sarah Silverman

I've always been really dark, and drawn to darker humor. Nothing has been forced, and I don't say anything for shock value. — Amy Schumer

I use the [vulgar] words because apparently these words do not corrupt morally. I'm from the street in New York, hung around in a tough neighborhood. It was common to curse, you make your point. It's a very effective language. I try not to overdo it. It's never to shock. I know where it fits, it's never to shock. There's no shock value left in words. — George Carlin

Now, some people do this for shock value. Shock is just another uptown word for surprise. Granted it has a different quality to it, but a joke is about surprising someone. I'm a great believer in context. You can joke about anything. I do like finding out where the line is drawn, deliberately crossing it and bringing some of them with me across the line, and having them be happy that I did. — George Carlin

There are a few critics overseas, and occasionally a critic will write an astute analysis of the movie. There is value in reading critics that actually have something intelligent to say, but the journalistic community lives in a world of sound bites and literary commerce: selling newspapers, selling books, and they do that simply by trashing things. They don't criticize or analyze them. They simply trash them for the sake of a headline, or to shock people to get them to buy whatever it is they're selling. — George Lucas

The ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction proves that their solution has become a matter of habit. Distraction as provided by art presents a covert control of the extent to which new tasks have become soluble by apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to avoid such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is able to mobilize the masses. Today it does so in the film. Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise. The film with its shock effect meets this mode of reception halfway. The film makes the cult value recede into the background not only by putting the public in the position of the critic, but also by the fact that at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one. — Walter Benjamin

With 3D, all you're doing is trying to shock the audience; there's no value to the storytelling. — Nick Nolte

We have a slate of four films. From Karen Young - the USA bestselling author - we have Blood Bayou. Again, we're relying on the story to tell itself and the characters tell it and not (relying on) shock value. It's a suspenseful drama ... The best way I can describe it is Pelican Brief meets Time to Kill. — Drew Waters

I'm the new Oberjarl."
I knew it," said Halt instantly, and the other three looked at him, totally scandalized.
You did?" Erak asked, his voice hollow, his eyes still showing the shock of his sudden elevation to the highest office in Skandia.
Of course," said the Ranger, shrugging. "You're big, mean, and ugly and those seem to be the qualities Skandian's value most. — John Flanagan

While it may seem a bit antithetical to use quite so many "naughty words" in an etiquette book, I can assure you that I would never use curse words for shock value alone or to prop up a needy joke. We live in a world in which one Real Housewife of New Jersey seriously admonished another to "show some fuckin' class!" Enough said. — Celia Rivenbark

Personally making a film solely for the shock value serves no purpose to me. — Timo Tjahjanto

Young kids should be doing music that has shock value. They'll grow out of it. — Talib Kweli

Most interviewers are looking for a headline. They're not skilled. They're looking for shock value. — Ice-T

I've been on shows that go for shock value. — Daphne Zuniga

I don't try to be completely calculating in everything I say and do, but there's no way I'm going to talk. There's no reason to. And that's why I'm such a boring interview, because I don't go for the shock value, or smartass answers. — Chris O'Donnell

A cemetery?" I chuckle, but the pitch is a bit higher than I expected. "At night? With a full moon? Um ... did you see any, uh, zombies, you, while you were there?"
Shiko blinks at me a few times. "No"
I slump in relief. "Thank God. I mean, I don't want to be the first to die. The funny guy always dies first, for shock value, you know. Rourke would get killed next, because it's be a heroic sacrifice or something." I motion to Shiko. "You'd live, though, unless you had sex."
... Shiko has the look of an addled kitten, complete with head tilt. Rourke sighs and leans toward her, embarrassed.
'You'll have to excuse him. According to his mother he has an irrational fear of something called the zombie apocalypse."
"It's not irrational! — Vaughn R. Demont

It's hard to explain how much that feeling of the bottom potentially falling out at any moment takes its toll. It makes you anxious, of course, and constant anxiety is impossible for the body to handle. So you develop a coping mechanism, and for us that meant shutting down. Everything we liked or wanted or felt joy in had to be hidden or suppressed. I'm sad to say that this method works. If you don't give as much credence or value to whatever it is that you love, it hurts less when it is inevitably taken from you. I had to pretend I had no joy. It will come as a shock to people who know me now, but being able to express joy was something it took me a long time to be confident enough to do. — Alan Cumming

In horror, character development is often pushed aside in favor of the shock value. The best genre movies to me are movies like The Shining. You had a connection to the characters in that film. — Joshua Leonard

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape. — Christine Stockton

I don't enjoy putting my characters through hell unless there's a reason. I don't use violence or anything just for shock value. They're always a means to an end. — Jeff Lemire

His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake. — G.K. Chesterton