For many of Mao's supporters it crossed a line, provoking vicious verbal attacks.
Russia responded to the apparent Georgian preparations by dispatching 400 paratroopers and a battery of howitzers to a staging area not far from the cease-fire line, provoking a strong protest from NATO.
Instead of envy, the News Corporation's bet on MySpace now provokes punch lines.
Rather, it is to provoke new lines of investigation by highlighting observations that challenge established paradigms about how blood pressure and CBF are fundamentally related.
The ear mites provoke the lining of the ear canal to produce excessive amounts of wax.
It's a lovely and thought-provoking line but how, for an English poet, can English words suggest lost homes?
It's an interesting artefact in a thought-provoking line; there have several attempts in recent years to show the world in terms of resources, deprivation or just rather more accurately than the problems which arise when you try to unroll a globe on to a flat surface.
He added: "Since many youth are quite impressionable, it is important to get to them [at] an early age... .. Imams and religious scholars, across the globe, tweet and update their Facebook statuses and fan pages regularly, often with a thought-provoking line or a religious quote.
For provoking such lovely lines alone, the adventure was probably worth it.
In November last year, having failed to get a response to their concerns from the detention centre managers, they tried to cast off the Bibby Progress's mooring lines, provoking a security alert, a heavy-handed response by PNG police, arrests, injuries and a legacy of simmering tensions.
Which in turn provoked another angry line-by-line response by Sam Patterson.
