Quotes About Obscenity

#1. I look like a hooker."
"A slut," I corrected. "Hookers have pastier complexions."
"The voice of experience, I'm sure.

Martyn V. Halm

#2. Second only to the master of us all, Clodia has become the most discussed person in Rome. Versus of unbounded obscenity are scribbled about her over the walls and pavements of all the baths and urinals in Rome.

Thornton Wilder

#3. What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?

Rex Stout

#4. The greatest issue is to raise the question of birth control out of the gutter of obscenity ... into the light of intelligence and human understanding.

Margaret Sanger

#5. I had woven a tapestry of obscenity that as far as I know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan.

Jean Shepherd

#6. The world today is so full of violence, obscenity, war, the failure of political systems. I try to make movies that make people a bit more confident. But that doesn't mean being sugary.

Rouben Mamoulian

#7. The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

Dorothy Parker

#8. The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.

Fulton J. Sheen

#9. The thing about cancer is that it can always exceed your worst expectations. There is something pornographic about cancer's ability to confound your imagination. Whatever new obscenity cancer comes up with to torment and torture you, it can always do worse tomorrow.

Tony Parsons

#10. Obscenity comes from grime.

Christopher Hitchens

#11. Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff.

D.H. Lawrence

#12. Our crucifixes exhibit the pain, but they veil, perhaps necessarily, the obscenity: but the death of the God-Man was both.

Charles Williams

#13. This [fundamentalism] is not religion. It is obscenity. These are lies, the criminal use of religious power to misguide people.

Anwar Sadat

#14. Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.

Henry Miller

#15. Manto had earlier been prosecuted in Lahore for obscenity, and one of the words alleged to have been obscene was, breasts

Saadat Hasan Manto

#16. And I think there's something about conservatives frankly - and the Left, when it comes to their channels of persuasion, are unpersuasive. They are, most of them are hate-filled, obscenity-clogged rants of anger and hatred.

Karl Rove

#17. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man ... there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.

Albert Camus

#18. Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

Bertrand Russell

#19. (The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity).

James D. Watson

#20. What is obscenity? And to whom?

Allen Ginsberg

#21. I can't think of a single big mistake I made in college that wasn't alcohol related. I never missed a class in college because I was too sober. I never yelled an obscenity at the fraternity next door because I was too sober. I never cheated on my girlfriend because I was too sober.

Will Keim

#22. Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism.

Sir John Woodroffe

#23. Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you.

Kurt Vonnegut

#24. Obscenity is a function of culture - a function in the mathematical sense, I mean, its value changing with that of the variables on which it depends.

A.P.

#25. You have to show violence the way it is. If you don't show it realistically, then that's immoral and harmful. If you don't upset people, then that's obscenity.

Roman Polanski

#26. Why shouldn't we have laws forbidding pornography and obscenity? Many heroic leaders have tried, but they have stumbled over even the definition of the word "obscenity." If we cannot agree on the length of a foot, it is because we have lost our yardstick.

Billy Graham

#27. Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.

D.H. Lawrence

#28. I have in my mind an obscenity so great that I could vomit the most dreadful words and it wouldn't be enough!

Georges Bataille

#29. Everyone likes the obscene; that is real life.

Christina Stead

#30. Fong's obscenity-spattered fit about keyboards. So what to look

Vernor Vinge

#31. Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

Bob Dylan

#32. I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone ... I think, myself, that it is an obscenity ...

Desmond Tutu

#33. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

Lev Grossman

#34. Heroism and obscenity appear no more important in the life of the universe than the fighting or mating of a pair of insects in the woods. All is on the same plane.

Henry Miller

#35. The violence and obscenity are left unadulterated, as manifestation of the mystery and pain which ever accompanies the act of creation.

Anais Nin

#36. Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.

Kevin Bales

#37. Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.

Henry Miller

#38. I don't want a moratorium on the death penalty. I want the abolition of it. I can't understand why a country [USA] that's so committed to human rights doesn't find the death penalty an obscenity.

Desmond Tutu

#39. Justice precedes beauty. Without justice, beauty is impossible, an obscenity. And when beauty has gone, what does a cameraman do with his eye?

Tony Kushner

#40. Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Brendan Gill

#41. Lovers who are free to go when they are restless always come back; lovers who are free to change remain interesting. The bitter animosity and obscenity of divorce is unknown where individuals have not become Siamese twins.

Germaine Greer

#42. You can tell a true war story if it embarrasses you. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth; if you don't care for the truth, watch how you vote. Send guys to war, they come home talking dirty.

Tim O'Brien

#43. Where no paths exist, a man strays only when he misses his destination. There is no crime, no transgression, no sin save foolishness or incompetence, and no obscenity save the tyranny of custom.

R. Scott Bakker

#44. I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.

Potter Stewart

#45. It is full of interest, it has noble poetry in it and some clever fables and some blood drenched history, some good morals and a wealth of obscenity and upwards of a thousand lies.
(Re The Bible)

Mark Twain

#46. It is not the idea as such which the censor attacks, whether it be heresy or radicalism or obscenity. He attacks the circulation of the idea among the classes which in his judgment are not to be trusted with the idea.

Walter Lippmann

#47. If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth.

Tim O'Brien

#48. Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

Herbert Marcuse

#49. John could have prevented all of this from happening, but instead chose to educate us through the obscenity of proof.

David Price

#50. I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.

Jane Alexander

#51. The only time they appear human is when you have a knife at their throats. The instant you remove it, they fall back into animality. Obscenity.

Jack Henry Abbott

#52. The Bible has noble poetry in it ... and some good morals and a wealth of obscenity, and upwards of a thousand lies.

Mark Twain

#53. Commercial speech is like obscenity ... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it.

Jef I. Richards

#54. It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

Richard Preston

#55. Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

Susie Bright

#56. Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.

William J. Brennan Jr.

#57. To be a devil isn't so bad; to be a devil that can still see beauty, still remember what it was like to be in the sight of the most holy, now that was an obscenity, and that was what I was.

Candice Raquel Lee

#58. Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.

Theodore Schroeder

#59. They told me I was not to draw.

Mike Diana

#60. Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.

Matthew Woodring Stover

#61. The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic.

Rod Serling

#62. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies.

Betty Smith

#63. But if "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder, so is "obscenity.

Sydney J. Harris

#64. I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned.

Jean-Paul Sartre

#65. The justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography.

Phyllis Schlafly

#66. The problem is that censors create the concept of obscenity. By supposedly trying to protect us they form an absurd concept of what is obscene.

Catherine Breillat

#67. Art can't decide whether the War on Drugs is an obscene absurdity or an absurd obscenity. In either case, it's a tragic, bloody farce.

Don Winslow

#68. I obscenity in the milk of my shame.

Ernest Hemingway,

#69. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that individual communities should set obscenity standards. Whenever a case is tried, it will be based on a community standard for that particular place.

Larry Flynt

#70. Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life, is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

#71. History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.

Holbrook Jackson

#72. Pornography and obscenity ... work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground
situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.

Marshall McLuhan

#73. Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.

Georges Bataille

#74. The daily lesson of slum life, visualised, reiterated, of low standards, vile living, obscenity, profanity, impurity, is bound tobe dwarfing and debasing to the children who are in the midst of it.

Albion Fellows Bacon

#75. It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

Christopher Hitchens

#76. The trick with a truly successful intimidation is not to rely on volume or obscenity, but to cultivate that quiet certainty which informs any listener that your people will do the shouting for you, should the moment come.

Claire North

#77. Nothing is more obscene to me than the glorification of suffering.

Marty Rubin

#78. That which attempts to elevate the ugly to the level of beauty becomes neither; but an obscenity.

John Donne

#79. Parents, just keep in mind that kids will always round off to the nearest obscenity..

Ray Romano

#80. When you say, "I fucked up," the action retains its meaning, its sordid origin, its obscenity, and its poetry. Poetry is quite compatible with obscenity.

Charles Baxter

#81. The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition.

George Carlin

#82. The function of the West is to turn bodies and minds into products. It cannot understand that the rest of the world holds this to be an obscenity, a corruption of our nirvanic nature.

John Burdett

#83. Remember that the Tarot is a great and sacred arcanum - its abuse is an obscenity in the inner and a folly in the outer. It is intended for quite other purposes than to determine when the tall dark man will meet the fair rich widow.

Jack Parsons

#84. It's all a complete farce you understand? We're born into a losing struggle ... I've investigated the road up ahead. No one comes out of this a winner. In the meantime I think one must show some contempt and some defiance and the best means of doing that that I know are irony and obscenity.

Christopher Hitchens

#85. I'd heard that Lenny Bruce used a lot of profanity and obscenities in his act, and I was curious.

Sheldon Harnick

#86. The definition of obscenity on the newsstands should be extended to many hunting magazines.

Wayne Pacelle

#87. In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

Joyce Carol Oates

#88. Mullahs from the TNSM preached that the earthquake was a warning from God. They said it was caused by women's freedom and obscenity. If we did not mend our ways and introduce sharia or Islamic law, they shouted in their thundering voices, more severe punishment would come.

Malala Yousafzai

#89. What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gipsy obscenity? What are you doing?

Ernest Hemingway,

#90. I start at the beginning, mentally screaming every obscenity I can in alphabetical order. Then I start setting them to the tune of Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Kiersten White

#91. Politicians must set their aims for the high ground and according to our various leanings, Democratic, Republican, Independent, we will follow. Politicians must be told if they continue to sink into the mud of obscenity, they will proceed alone.

Maya Angelou

#92. Of all the strange "crimes" that human beings have legislated out of nothing, "blasphemy" is the most amazing - with "obscenity" and "indecent exposure" fighting it out for second and third place.

Robert A. Heinlein

#93. Bundy was correct in saying that most serial murderers are addicted to hardcore pornography. FBI records validate that point. Not every person exposed to obscenity will become a killer, of course, but too many will!

James C. Dobson

#94. Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.

Mark Twain

#95. We who have witnessed the obscenity of war and experienced its horror and terrible consequences have an obligation to rise above our pain and suffering and turn the tragedy of our lives into a triumph.

Ron Kovic