Provincial Quotes - page 2

Tourists do not come here for our weather, or for the quality of our provincial cooking. Nor are they attracted by the exceptional value of our hotels, our beaches, or Birmingham. I've never met an American or a Japanese person who has said: "I want to come to Britain so I can buy an Arabic newspaper from a Bengali store where the Cashier speaks Polish." (Jeremy Clarkson)
Singapura means lion-city; prehistoric, myopic, Sanskrit-speaking visitors having spotted a mangy tiger or two in the mangroves. Sly Malays sometimes call it Singa pura-pura, which means ‘pretending to be a lion'....It is a profoundly provincial town pretending to be a metropolis.
Anthony Burgess
[Provincial Fascism is] "no longer liberation, but tyranny; no longer protector of the nation, but defense of private interests and of the dullest, deafest, most miserable cast that exists in Italy."
Benito Mussolini
The English language was created by poets, a five-hundred year enterprise of emotion and metaphor, the richest dialogue in world literature. French rhetorical models are too narrow for the English tradition. Most pernicious of French imports is the notion that there is no person behind a text. Is there anything more affected, aggressive, and relentlessly concrete than a Parisian intellectual behind his/her turgid text? The Parisian is a provincial when he pretends to speak for the universe.
Camille Paglia
The truth is, Homo sapiens sapiens is pretty much the same the world over, regardless of skin color or technological development. Racists and provincial types have problems with this fact, but it is a fact. All mortals have the same potential, and only chance determines who's playing a spinet or who's clubbing dinner to death with a big rock. And, you know what? Mortals adapt to the environment in which they're placed. Switch babies between savages and technologicals, and nobody notices! I know, because I've seen it done. I've seen the son of a club-carrying cave dweller fuming because his accounting software wasn't quite adequate for his needs. All humans have the same brain package.
Kage Baker
Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country.
Aravind Adiga
India's great economic boom, the arrival of the Internet and outsourcing, have broken the wall between provincial India and the world.
Aravind Adiga
Everything you have done, my nobles, has been stupid. You have been cruel, greedy, careless of others' lives and wills. You have been blind, thoughtless, provincial and unimaginative. It seems to me that a government so careless of anything but its own gratification should be at very least replaced.
Michael Moorcock
About this time, on 14 April, 1692, orders were issued to the provincial governor and the district fojdar to demolish the temples at Rasulpur.'...'Sankar, a messenger, was sent to demolish a temple near Sheogaon. He came back after pulling it down on 20 November, 1693.'...'Bijai Singh and several other Hindus were reported to be carrying on public worship of idols in a temple in the neighbourhood of Ajmer. On 23 June, 1694, the governor of Ajmer was ordered to destroy the temple and stop the public adoration of idol worship there.'...
Aurangzeb
The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality.
Paul R. Ehrlich
What is an artist A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one. It's this in-between . . . this frontier country between the tangible world and the intangible one -- which is really the realm of the artist. (Federico Fellini)
"Wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun.
Emily Brontë
The major cuts in federal and provincial transfers to social service agencies, health care, education, and social housing over the past several years have not bee matched by an explosion in private giving. Nor will they ever be.
Bob Rae
The country is provincial; it becomes ridiculous when it tries to ape Paris.
Honoré de Balzac
The editorial page played streams of invective across the provincial political scene like a fire hose. Harangues, pitted with epithets. Gammy bird was a hard bite. Looked life right in its shifty, bloodshot eye. A tough little paper. Gave Quoyle an uneasy feeling, the feeling of standing on a playground watching others play games whose rules he didn't know.
Annie Proulx
I'm a child of provincial France.
Emmanuel Macron
When most Italian artists of my own generation were afraid to be too 'modern,' too 'international' in their style, not 'national' or 'imperial' enough, I was still left in peace, perhaps because I demanded so little recognition. My privacy was thus my protection and, in the eyes of the Grand Inquisitors of Italian art, I remained a provincial professor of etching, at the Fine Art Academy in Bologna.
Giorgio Morandi
You know, the state of Connecticut is... sometimes it's a provincial state. And I've been working very hard to get the endorsement of the people within our state, and ultimately, the ultimate endorsement is from the voters in the state of Connecticut.
Linda McMahon
The East Coast, and certainly Boston, has a provincial quality to it that makes it harder to bust out and move up. Try to be too different and they'll pull you down.
Brad Falchuk
Sometimes Hollywood is a small town on the West Coast of America at the furthest point from everywhere else, and that can make it a little provincial and insular.
Howard Stringer
With the growth of Harvard from a small provincial college into a great University, a unique paranoia has swept the ranks of local officialdom, furrowing brows throughout University Hall. The lurking fear is that somehow, in the operations of the gigantic administrative machine, a student might get lost in the shuffle. (J. Anthony Lukas)
Although we have do not have adequate access to all parts of Darfur we do fortunately have humanitarian personnel, including staff from my own office, in each of the three provincial capitals of Darfur.
Jan Egeland
In regard to education, something has been done by the Provincial Legislature; but to build churches, and to place clergymen is a work of greater difficulty.
John Strachan
I am haunted by what my life would have been had I not had the courage in my early twenties to leave Pittsburgh for New York City and really commit to being a writer. Pittsburgh is both post-industrial and provincial, and the opportunities there are limited. It would have been quite easy to simply drift through life.
Said Sayrafiezadeh
I knew Id have to go to Paris eventually, and I didnt want to be the provincial kid who just turns up and says, I want to act.
Tahar Rahim