Shocking The World Quotes & Sayings

I don't know if it's shocking, but I'm the world's biggest klutz. I have been dancing since I was 3, and I have modeled, and I have good balance, but you wouldn't know it. Hanging out with me, I do everything from spill food on myself to trip up stairs. I'm the queen of that, most definitely. — Tiffany Dupont

From the late 1830s to the Second World War, China was bullied and humiliated on a vast scale. And it was more shocking for the Chinese because they had lived with the illusion of power and self-sufficiency for much longer than the Ottomans. 'Our country's civilization,' Liang Qichao pointed out in 1902, 'is the oldest in the world. Three thousand years ago, Europeans were living like beasts in the field, while our civilization, its characteristics pronounced, was already equivalent to theirs of the middle ages.
This wasn't just some cultural defensiveness. China could trace its culture back 4,000 years, and political unity to the third century BC. — Pankaj Mishra

I do not love; I do not love anybody except myself. That is a rather shocking thing to admit. I have none of the selfless love of my mother. I have none of the plodding, practical love ... I am, to be blunt and concise, in love only with myself, my puny being with its small inadequate breasts and meager, thin talents. I am capable of affection for those who reflect my own world. — Sylvia Plath

Had I no other proof of the immortality of the soul than the oppression of the just and the triumph of the wicked in this world, this alone would prevent my having the least doubt of it. So shocking a discord amidst a general harmony of things would make me naturally look for a cause; I should say to myself we do not cease to exist with this life; everything reassumes its order after death. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

No personality as strong as Zelda's could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I've always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has "kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more," cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it's these things I'd believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn't all that she should be.
But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that's the beginning and end of everything. You're still a Catholic but Zelda's the only God I have left now. — F Scott Fitzgerald

'Heathers' was probably the first time when I started to notice that people were opening doors for me and giving me tables at restaurants, regardless of what I was wearing. A whole world opened up to me that was shocking and weird and different, and I enjoyed it, and, you know, I took great advantage of it at times. — Christian Slater

She'd let her eyes water so the view was blurry, which gave certain qualities of the world neglected by clear eyesight the chance to come forth, such as the shocking beauty of color, and she remembered this with compassion for that silly young self, which had deserved to have her hand held. — Elizabeth Mckenzie

Of course, you can't literally think like this all the time, or you'd drive yourself crazy. And so for most lawyers, a house is, finally, just a house, something to fill and fix and repaint and empty. But there's a period in which every law student - every good law student - finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realizes that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life, escapes its long, graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unbearable. He — Hanya Yanagihara

If you ask a Saudi Imam why women in Saudi Arabia can't drive, he'll say, 'Because Islam demands it.' But that's absurd, because - first of all - Islam demands no such thing; and secondly, the only country in the world in which women can't drive is Saudi Arabia. The inability to understand the difference between a cultural practice and religious belief is shocking among self-described intellectuals. — Reza Aslan

If our planet has seen some eighty billion people it is difficult to suppose hat every individual has had his or her own repertory of gestures. Arithmetically, it is simply impossible. Without the slightest doubt, there are far fewer gestures in the world than there are individuals. That finding leads us to a shocking conclusion: a gesture is more individual than an individual. We could put it in the form of an aphorism: many people, few gestures. — Milan Kundera

The way Lillian says it is hungry, like she's waiting for something to be revealed, and I wonder if maybe that's the real difference between us - that when she pulls back the curtain and stares into the blackness behind it, it's just one more way of testing herself. Like some game you can never win, because even if you face all the shocking realities and the horrors of the world, once you've seen that kind of awfulness, you can never un-see it. You have to carry it around with you forever. — Brenna Yovanoff

Is it possible that our world still knows better how to deal with a bandit, a murderer, and insurrectionist than it knows what to do with the Prince of Peace? There is a sense in which an assassin's attempt on the pope's life is less shocking to our world than the pope's forgiveness of him. Is it possible that we would rather deal with raw power that rides on a stallion than with this one who comes on a donkey, with the weapons of love, patience, suffering, and peace? Given the choice, isn't it possible that we would take Barabbas, too? — James A. Harnish

I had been conscious of depression and so I voiced to (Sec. Of War Stimson) my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at this very moment, seeking a way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' — Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

My best friend came to visit from far away. She took two planes and a train to get to Brooklyn. We met at a bar near my apartment and drank in a hurry as the babysitter's meter ticked. In the past, we talked about books and other people, but now we talked only of our respective babies, hers sweet-faced and docile, mine at war with the world. We applied our muzzy intellects to a theory of light. That all are born radiating light but that this light diminished slowly (if one was lucky) or abruptly (if one was not). The most charismatic people - the poets, the mystics, the explorers - were that way because they had somehow managed to keep a bit of this light that was meant to have dimmed. But the shocking thing, the unbearable thing it seemed, was that the natural order was for this light to vanish. It hung on sometimes through the twenties, a glint here or there in the thirties, and then almost always the eyes went dark. — Jenny Offill

For when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs all of the others ... the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have the less you worry.
When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have three francs left, you are quite indifferent ... you are bored but you are not afraid. You think vaguely "I shall be starving in a day or two- shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne. — George Orwell

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity. — Gail Caldwell

It was also the year that ushered in the birth of a soul who was to grow up in a Maharashtrian home as a rabid Hindu nationalist; allegedly a closet homosexual and a staunch, self-styled "patriot" who would be globally abhorred for the most shocking political assassination, the world had ever known. — Neelima Dalmia Adhar

I'm of the opinion that many Christians are in deep denial about the reality of there being 'real' Evil in this world. Evil that cannot be reasoned with; is reprobate, incorrigible, determined, un-appeasable, violent, murderous, and unrelenting. I find this denial shocking in that the Bible clearly shows that in the end this battle is all about Good vs. Evil. This is a very real and present danger to the leaders and people of Israel. They know the truth and are not in any denial about it!!! It's harsh, yes! However, it is Real and a danger to those in Israel. This is not my first rodeo!!! Combat brings me no joy!!! But, God has His holy warriors who risk their lives so others can have the luxury to live in denial!!! Israeli's have no such luxury!!! — R. Alan Woods

Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips. — C.S. Lewis

The tea kettle whistled, and Melissa poured it over the tea at the bottom of the glass pot. While it steeped, Melissa opened the back door to her favorite sight in her corner of the world - her herb and butterfly garden. Blue and purple lupine, shocking pink four o'clocks, orange poppies, and sunny-yellow damiana greeted her, still shaded by the fig tree on the east side of the garden. — Leslie Leigh

Don't be fooled by clever hands, sir" the Sunlight Man said. He'd be lying with the back of his head on his hands, as he always lay. "Entertainment's all very well, but the world is serious. It's exceedingly amusing, when you think about it: nothing in life is as startling or shocking or mysterious as a good magician's trick. That's what makes stagecraft deadly. Listen closely, friend. You see great marvels performed on the stage - the lady sawed in half, the fat man supported by empty air, the Hindu vanishing with the folding of a cloth - and the subtlest of poisons drifts into your brain: you think the earth dead because the sky is full of spirits, you think the hall drab because the stage is adazzle with dimestore gilt. So King Lear rages, and the audience grows meek, and tomorrow, in the gray of old groceries, the housewife will weep for Cordelia and despair for herself. They weren't fools, those old sages who called all art the Devil's work. It eats the soul. — John Gardner

The percentage of people that go to drama college in the U.K. is probably just like anywhere in the world. It's a very hard business to work in. They say that, at any one time, there's only 5% of actors in the world that are actually working and getting paid, which is a shocking percentage, really. — Luke Evans

The Congo is very wealthy from oil money but is not paying its debts and at the same time is applying for special status at the World Bank. That's shocking and disingenuous. — Paul Singer

That we do not discover reality but rather invent it is quite shocking for many people. And the shocking part about it - according to the concept of radical constructivism - is that the only thing we can ever know about the real reality (if it even exists) is what it is not. It is only with the collapse of our constructions of reality that we first discover that the world is not the way we imagine. — Paul Watzlawick

The shocking truth about prosperity is that it is shockingly right instead of shockingly wrong for you to be prosperous. Please note that the word 'rich' means having an abundance of good or living a fuller, more satisfying life. Indeed, you are prosperous to the degree that you are experiencing peace, health, happiness and plenty in your world. There are honorable methods that can carry you quickly toward that goal. It is easier to accomplish than you may now think. That, too, is the shocking truth about prosperity. — Catherine Ponder

Alterations in the environment place us under personal stress. Changes in our routines and the physical, social, cultural, and economic environment forces us to make decisive decisions, we cannot continue our robotic ways. We must adapt to fresh encounters with the peripheral world. Variation in our external domain brings about shocking revolutions of our internal realm of thoughts and emotions. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Star Trek?" I asked her. "Really?"
"What?" she demanded, bending unnaturally black eyebrows together.
"There are two kinds of people in the universe, Molly," I said. "Star Trek fans and Star Wars fans. This is shocking."
She sniffed. "This is the post-nerd-closet world, Harry. It's okay to like both."
"Blasphemy and lies," I said. — Jim Butcher

Her eyes are shockingly black - shocking not because black eyes are particularly rare, but because she's wearing smoky gray eyeshadow and dark eyeliner to accentuate them further. Makeup, while the world is ending. — N.K. Jemisin

I don't think we are the same, women and men. We're different. But I don't think we are less than men. There are more women than men in the world - ask any single woman! So, it is shocking that men are in more positions of power. — Salma Hayek

Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. — H.P. Lovecraft

[W]hen Ben was kissing me, the whole world retreated. I felt things I'd never felt before, in places I never knew were connected.
But I was pretty sure that whatever was buzzing against my thigh was not normal. For one thing, it was ringing.
Ben dragged his mouth away from mine and mumbled a curse that was a little shocking and kind of hot.
"Ignore it," he said.
That was easy for him to say when his cell phone was rounding third base. If anyone got a home run tonight, I didn't want it to be Verizon Wireless. — Rosemary Clement-Moore

This is what is meant by "sacrifice", literally, the "making sacred" of an animal consumed for dinner. Yet sacrfice, because it dwells on the death, is a concept often shocking to the secular modern Western mind - to people who calmly organize daily hecatombs of beasts, and who are among the most death-dealing carnivores the world has ever seen. — Margaret Visser

If you compare the violence in 'Happy Valley' to the violence in something like 'Game of Thrones,' it's nothing. But it is shocking because it's so real and grounded. The characters could live next door to you - they're not in a remote fantasy world. — James Norton

On international relations, Eleanor Roosevelt really takes a great shocking leadership position on the World Court. In fact, it amuses me. The very first entry in her FBI file begins in 1924, when Eleanor Roosevelt supports American's entrance into the World Court. And the World Court comes up again and again - '33, '35. In 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt goes on the air; she writes columns; she broadcast three, four times to say the US must join the World Court. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

I've always had a desire to be provocative and to make people think, but it wouldn't be any challenge for me just to be shocking. That is where it begins for me, not where it stops. And I could be much more shocking. I think I've adopted a sense of subtlety. I don't sit around wondering how I can make myself even stranger to the world. I've simply evolved into the monster I created, and I'm quite happy with it. — Marilyn Manson

In our contemporary social and intellectual plight, it is nothing less than shocking to discover that those persons who claim to have discovered an absolute are usually the same people who also pretend to be superior to the rest. To find people in our day attempting to pass off to the world and recommending to others some nostrum of the absolute which they claim to have discovered is merely a sign of the loss of and the need for intellectual and moral certainty, felt by broad sections of the population who are unable to look life in the face. — Karl Mannheim

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter's books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health 'way back in the days beyond recall. — P.G. Wodehouse

Of course, almost ali people, guided by the traditional manner of dealing with ethical precepts, peremptorily repudiate such an explanation of the issue. Social institutions, they assert, must be just. It is base to judge them merely according to their fitness to attain definite ends, however desirable these ends may be from any other point of view. What matters first is justice. The extreme formulation of this idea is to be found in the famous phrase: fiai fustitia, pereat mundus. Let justice be done, even if it destroys the world. Most supporters of the postulate of justice will reject this maxim as extravagant, absurd, and paradoxical. But it is not more absurd, merely more shocking, than any other reference to an arbitrary notion of absolute justice. It clearly shows the fallacies of the methods applied in the discipline of intuitive ethics. — Ludwig Von Mises

Seattle is beautiful. You look at the sky and it's one of the most beautiful skies in the world, and then there's the Puget Sound, which will kill you, if you fall into it, but it's also beautiful. Seattle is a city of contradictions. It's the most liberal and most literate city in America, and it has Starbucks and [Bill] Gates, but it's also where the Green River killer hunted women and where the runaway population is just shocking when you walk the streets. Within the same city, there's darkness and light. — Veena Sud

Heartbroken and in tears over the shocking death of my friend, the incomparable Ms. Whitney Houston. My heartfelt condolences to Whitney's family and to all her millions of fans throughout the world. She will never be forgotten as one of the greatest voices to ever grace the earth. — Mariah Carey

She had never in her life met such an innocent. In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil. There was none in him: she knew it when she saw him up on that windowsill the night before, the lightning shocking the world behind him. His eagerness, his deep kindness, these were the benefits of his privilege. This peaceful sleep of being born male and rich and white and American and at this prosperous time, when the wars that were happening were far from home. This boy, told from the first moment he was born that he could do what he wanted. All he needed was to try. Mess up over and over, and everyone would wait until he got it right. She — Lauren Groff

How shocking must thy summons be, O death, to him that is at ease in his possessions! who, counting on long years of pleasure here, is quite unfurnished for the world to come. — Robert Blair

You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain."

She was quite right. It was that simplicity that seemed somehow to be the nucleus of the shock. From very familiarity one forgets all the forces which keep the balance, and thinks of security as normal. It is not. — John Wyndham

I beg your pardon for questioning your judgement," she said. "It is nothing to me, after all, if it proves faulty. I am not the one responsible for the Marquess of Atherton's heir and sole offspring. I am not the one who will be toppled from my pedestal if the world learns I have not only permitted but encouraged my nephew to associate with the most shocking persons. I am not the one who-"
"I wish you were the one who had heard of the rule Silence is Golden," he said. — Loretta Chase

Due to climate change and growing world population, the demand for vital requirements for human survival will continue to rise. If the world is not producing as much food as demanded, the prices will continue to rise affecting the poor and lower classes more, in every society. It is sad, looking at the shocking statistics of people who die every day as well as the spread of preventable diseases in developing nations, just because people do not have access to clean drinking water. So are we proud of our leadership contribution? Are we doing enough to increase food production, harvest rain water and replenish underground water reserves? — Archibald Marwizi

In the meantime, though, the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination sure seems funny. The event known around the world as hashtagGOPClownCar is improbable, colossal, spectacular and shocking; epic, monumental, heinous and disgusting. It's like watching 17 platypuses try to mount the queen of England. You can't tear your eyes away from it. It — Matt Taibbi

Abortion is one of the most shocking, yet entirely logical, extensions of this obsession with comfort, convenience and luxury. Less dramatic, but just as deadly to millions of lost souls in our world, is our unwillingness to make even small sacrifices to reach them with the Gospel. — K.P. Yohannan

For we are not all equally afflicted with the same disease or all in need of the same severe cure. This is the reason why we see different persons disciplined with different crosses. The heavenly Physician takes care of the well-being of all his patients; he gives some a milder medicine and purifies others by more shocking treatments, but he omits no one; for the whole world, without exception, is ill (Deut 32:15). — John Calvin

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. — H.G.Wells

Hitler wrote: "Mind and soul ultimately return to the collective being of the world. If there is a God, then he gives us not only life but also consciousness and awareness. If I live my life according to my God-given insights, then I cannot go wrong, and even if I do, I know that I have acted in good faith."134 For many of my uncritically "tolerant" students, there would be nothing here with which theologically to disagree. For them too, the mere sincerity of being true to your inner self guarantees that you can't go wrong when you act in good faith. My introductory exercise sometimes succeeds in shocking students out of the lazy complacency of uncritical tolerance of any and all theologies.135 Sincerity does not count for much.136 — Paul R. Hinlicky

Speaker, with mixed emotions we mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish genocide of the Armenian people. In taking notice of the shocking events in 1915, we observe this anniversary with sorrow in recalling the massacres of Armenians and with pride in saluting those brave patriots who survived to fight on the side of freedom during World War I. — Gerald R. Ford

One must take into account the shocking fact that we live on a world that spins. After considering this truth, nothing should come as a surprise. — Thomas Ligotti

I watched the young naive middle-class women and men of the twenty-first century learn the true nature of the world they live in. I watched all this happening, and I believe there is hope. I believe that if anything can save us in this fraught and dazzling future, it is the rage of women and girls, of queers and freaks and sinners. I believe that the revolution will be feminist, and that when it comes it will be more intimate and more shocking than we have dared to imagine. — Laurie Penny

It is thought strange and particularly shocking by some persons for a woman to question the absolute correctness of the Bible. She is supposed to be able to go through this world with her eyes shut, and her mouth open wide enough to swallow Jonah and the Garden of Eden without making a wry face ... Of all human beings a woman should spurn the Bible first. — Helen H. Gardener

I came to terms with living mostly in a world of horror pictures or genre pictures. I have had a few chances to get outside and do something different, like Paris, Je T'Aime or Music Of The Heart, but mostly it's been my lot. And to have created, with a few shocking films, an awareness or a perception of me as somebody dangerous and scary - that can be sold, but trying to sell me for some other kind of picture, like Music Of The Heart, was very difficult. — Wes Craven

We have barely emerged from centuries of barbarism. It's not a surprise that there are shocking inequities in this world. It is hard work to climb down out of the trees and walk upright,and build a viable global civilization when you start with technology that is made of rocks and sticks and fur. This is a project, and progress is dificult. — Sam Harris

Jesus' words are slightly less shocking when you consider that exclusive claims to truth are more common than we know. Truth is, by its nature, exclusive. Two differing claims cannot both be right. Math teachers make exclusive claims all the time. They will tell you that the multiplication table is not up for negotiation. There are right answers and wrong ones. A doctor's prescription is an exclusive claim as well. It excludes every medication except the one that is written on the prescription paper. A person who gives you their phone number is telling you to exclude dialing all other numbers except the digits they have provided you. — Jon Morrison

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

There's a funny thing about fame. The truth is you run as fast as you can towards it because it's everything you want. Not just the fame but what it represents, meaning work, meaning opportunity. And then you get there, and it's shocking how immediately you become enveloped in this world that is incredibly restricting. — George Clooney

There have been the most terrible, shocking events taking place in the United States of America within the last couple of hours ... We can only imagine the terror and carnage there and the many, many innocent people who have lost their lives ... perpetrated by fanatics who are utterly indifferent to the sanctity of human life, and we, the democracies of this world, are going to have to come together to fight it and eradicate this evil completely from our world. — Tony Blair

Humor, drama, romance, whatever genre of entertainment you create or consume is only effective if it is challenging to your sensibilities. When the sexuality of seeing a woman's ankles became trumped by her calf, society changed. When the calf was later trumped by a woman offering shots of alcohol from her vagina on Rock of Love, society changed again. My hope for this world is that we can soon run out of shocking body parts and can finally see the humor in our aetheric bodies. — Christy Leigh Stewart

Our host drifted away, and Vidia and I continued chatting about this and that. Swift judgments came down. The simplicity in Hemingway was "bogus" and nothing, Vidia said, like his own. Things Fall Apart was a fine book, but Achebe's refusal to write about his decades in America was disappointing. Heart of Darkness was good, but structurally a failure. I asked him about the biography by Patrick French, The World Is What It Is, which he had authorized. He stiffened. That book, which was extraordinarily well written, was also shocking in the extent to which it revealed a nasty, petty, and insecure man. "One gives away so much in trust," Vidia said. "One expects a certain discretion. It's painful, it's painful. But that's quite all right. Others will be written. The record will be corrected." He sounded like a boy being brave after gashing his thumb. The — Teju Cole