Challenging Perspectives Quotes

I always want to see films that are startling and amazing. Not just shocking. Shocking is easy to do. But startling in the way that makes you change how you think about things. Those are the movies I like the best.

'Preacher' really appeals to my iconoclastic nature because I'm a student of comparative world religions since my early 20s, so I love shows that really challenge what you think about all these things. I think it's genius. I was so excited there was a role I could play on it.

The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

The best kind of comedy to me is when you make people laugh at things they've never laughed at, and also take a light into the darkened corners of people's minds, exposing them to the light.

I'm about challenging people. Like, properly challenging them and their assumptions.

If you have a therapist who agrees with your every word, then your brain isn't getting proper exercise.

I like the idea of subversively communicating with people... so that you make people see things in different ways.

I want to upset people, I want to make people think, I want to keep people interested.

When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.

Some of the best people with whom you can have a relationship are the people who challenge your thinking.

I think criticism is often so pallid, so tame. I wish it were more performative.

Most people don't see the edginess in my work. They think it's all fantasy and whimsy.

I don't like hot takes any more than I like hot cakes.

Is it possible to do something that that makes an audience uncomfortable, challenges them, makes them see things they're not used to? Here in these films [Salome the play and Salomaybe], I have the opportunity to say something about how I feel about things.

The culture is just so coarse that you have to take it to that level and people will be like, 'Whoa!' And then you can make people think about stuff. It's kind of like shock therapy.

The opposition is indispensable. A good statesman, like any other sensible human being, always learns more from his opponents than from his fervent supporters. For his supporters will push him to disaster unless his opponents show him where the dangers are. So if he is wise he will often pray to be delivered from his friends, because they will ruin him. But though it hurts, he ought also to pray never to be left without opponents; for they keep him on the path of reason and good sense.

I don't just want to talk to the choir. I want to sit down and be respectful of the people who are most unlike me, to get them to hear me and think. It doesn't mean you're going to change them right there, but just so they can hear you and what you're saying.

I think that its an artist's responsibility to have a point of view. Society takes its cue from popular art. People need something to look to, something to provoke them into questioning whether they completely hate something or completely love something.

If you aim to be controversial for the sake of it you'd end up with a very thin and meaningless show.

Art has the power to influence and to make you react to something that you normally wouldn't concern, worry, or even think about or wouldn't want to talk about.

We all need critical confrontation of the fullest and most extreme kind that we can get. You can unnecessarily limit yourself by choosing your criticism.

A critical component of progress is engaging with people you don't agree with - everything else is the status quo.

My challenge as a satirical artist is how to present ideas to people to enable them to question and reexamine their beliefs. My hope is, that my work provokes people to look at things in a new way.

Maybe my life isn't great. We don't have all the answers. Look at it from my side.

Untested assumptions and lazy habits of thought can be shown up, once put in a spotlight of a different hue.