Quotes About Taboos

#1. American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos.

Diane Wakoski

#2. I don't have prejudices. I'm against taboos. But of course there are some things I'll never touch - because as a mom, there are things one doesn't want their children to be around.

Karl Lagerfeld

#3. Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

H.L. Mencken

#4. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

H.L. Mencken

#5. The eurozone status quo is neither tolerable nor stable. Mainstream economists would call it an inferior equilibrium; I call it a nightmare - one that is inflicting tremendous pain and suffering that could be easily avoided if the misconceptions and taboos that sustain it were dispelled.

George Soros

#6. But an absolute value is not proven by logic or metaphysical arguments; it is accepted, believed (even when not discussed), and hedged about with taboos to protect it.

Rene Girard

#7. I want to show the event at the very moment it takes place ... My body must be anchored to the ground and seek the best point of view, without any visual taboos. But then, at the heart of the event, my effort is to disappear, I introduce a distance that borders on indifference.

Luc Delahaye

#8. What I've always loved about faeries is the way that they, unlike so many other supernatural creatures, are not human and have never been human. They have different customs and different taboos, and woe to anyone who breaks them.

Holly Black

#9. There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly.

Susan Sontag

#10. Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

Kate Millett

#11. Like their parents, kids flock to see James Bond and Derek Flint movies - outrageously antiheroic heroes who break all the taboos, making attractive the very things the kids are told they shouldn't do themselves.

Johnny Carson

#12. She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't have time.

Tove Jansson

#13. Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.

Pierre Trudeau

#14. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Henry Miller

#15. That civilised life cannot be lived without taboos - that some of them may indeed be justified, and that therefore taboo is not in itself an evil to be vanquished - is a thought too subtle for the aesthetes of nihilism.

Theodore Dalrymple

#16. Our duties and responsibilities as human beings must be shown to be so incontrovertible that even atheists must recognize them. There are ultimate taboos.

Hans Jonas

#17. It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

Alain De Botton

#18. As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos.

Bertrand Russell

#19. The moral, then, is that familiar categories of behavior - marriage customs, food taboos, folk superstitions, and so on - certainly do vary across cultures and have to be learned, but the deeper mechanisms of mental computation that generate them may be universal and innate.

Steven Pinker

#20. To look without fear is a good subversive tool, undermining taboos.

Wolfgang Tillmans

#21. The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This

Steven Pinker

#22. I think that when you're taking pictures with my principles, you can try anything. Dare to do a lot of things - dare with sexuality, dare to break taboos as long as it remains photogenic. As long as I find an elegance and beauty in it, I am not afraid to tackle anything.

Carine Roitfeld

#23. Money and sex are forces too unruly for our reason; they can only be controlled by taboos which we tamper with at our peril.

Logan Pearsall Smith

#24. There is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one's eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skin of an onion.

Alan Watts

#25. The trickster's function is to break taboos, create mischief, stir things up. In the end, the trickster gives people what they really want, some sort of freedom.

Tom Robbins

#26. There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.

Robert Cormier

#27. This is Nightside," said Deadboy. "We do ten impossible things before breakfast, just fora cheap thrill. Abandon all taboos, ye who enter here.

Simon R. Green

#28. I'm interested in the dark side of man. I'm interested in taboos, and murder is the greatest taboo. Characters are fascinating in their extremity, not in their happiness.

Elizabeth George

#29. Drama is made up of what people most fear and deny in themselves. The taboos. The secrets. The devils and the demons. The only reason they let us live, I suppose, is because somebody has to confront what those things are like and tell other people about them.

Elizabeth Ashley

#30. There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have.

George Carlin

#31. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.

James Baldwin

#32. In Poland, some people think that I'm kind of scandalous because I'm a woman who should stay at home with her kids instead of making movies about what I want and, even worse, addressing Polish taboos like church, homosexuals and history.

Malgorzata Szumowska

#33. We also have no taboos against freedom of expression. Although I am president, I must confront the criticism of party members in my election district once every three months. In addition, people pay close attention to what my wife does and how my children live.

Nguyen Minh Triet

#34. The secular argument, or the liberal argument, is to as much as possible remove taboos so things do not become unmentionable; to let some air into the discussion.

Christopher Hitchens

#35. Whenever I see a taboo, I just think that's something we need to drag screaming out into the light and discuss. Because taboos are where our fears live, and taboos are the things that keep us tiny. Particularly for women.

Caitlin Moran

#36. Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.

Jane Yolen

#37. If a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission.

Flemming Rose

#38. In other words, the most common problem now is not social taboos on sexual activity or guilt feeling about sex in itself, but the fact that sex for so many people is an empty, mechanical and vacuous experience.

Rollo May

#39. All taboos serve different human interests by avoiding those things which threaten to cause offence or distress

Kate Burridge

#40. It is the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god.

Charles Simic

#41. Suicide is one of the greatest professional taboos for a therapist, as you abandon not only friends and family, but also vulnerable clients. It

George Watsky

#42. The most exciting thing about women's liberation is that this century will be able to take advantage of talent and potential genius that have been wasted because of taboos.

Helen Reddy

#43. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable ...

H.L. Mencken

#44. There are no taboos in bed, and there shouldn't be any taboos in bed.

Frank Langella

#45. We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.

Ilka Chase

#46. Some of the old laws of Israel are clearly savage taboos of a familiar type thinly disguised as commands of the Deity.

James G. Frazer

#47. Nothing is further from the truth than the claim that the American soul is 'open-minded' and unbiased; on the contrary, it is ridden with countless taboos of which people are sometimes not even aware.

Julius Evola

#48. The sciences are being held back by assumptions that have hardened into dogmas, maintained by powerful taboos. I believe that the sciences will be regenerated when they are set free.

Rupert Sheldrake

#49. Social taboos are shy like virtue; once lost, there is no remedy

Gunnar Myrdal

#50. I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.

Mary Roach

#51. Taboos on the human heart are more dangerous than any risk we run by using our emotions. Sensation is the life of man; it is his actual energy. To suppress it is to lose creative power!

Phyllis Bottome

#52. Le religioni non sono altro che residuo dei vecchi tabu selvatici, sistemi di divieto con diverse sovrastrutture ideologiche."
" ... religions are nothing but remnant of the old wild taboos, prohibition systems with varying ideological superstructure.

Giovanni Papini

#53. I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

George Carlin

#54. The taboos that constitute a man's intellectual stature, often sedimented experiences and unarticulated insights, always operate against inner impulses that he has learned to condemn, but which are so strong that only an unquestioning and unquestioned authority can hold them in check.

Theodor Adorno

#55. I never consciously set out to talk about taboos or anything like that.

Roseanne Barr

#56. Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have.

John Steinbeck

#57. Eating is aggressive by nature, and the implements required for it could quickly become weapons; table manners are, most basically, a system of taboos designed to ensure that violence remains out of the question.

Margaret Visser

#58. I grew up in a house where there were no taboos, so it came originally from a pretty innocent place, where I was shocked at the things that shocked people.

Sarah Silverman

#59. Good horror fiction deals with taboos. It must always go to the limits of what is acceptable.

Clive Barker

#60. Fashion is as profound and critical a part of the social life of man as sex, and is made up of the same ambivalent mixture of irresistible urges and inevitable taboos.

Rene Konig

#61. Today, fear of bloodshed is forcing us into recognizing new taboos: those of Muslims.

Patrick Chappatte

#62. Our fears and taboos are largely social conditions imposed upon us by the ruling powers in order to keep us opressed. They manipulate us with our fears. Now let us be fearless.

Kathy Change

#63. I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.

Michael Malone

#64. The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.

Freda Adler

#65. The physical vanity of the diet-and-exercise obsessive is recast as the pursuit of a kind of ritual purity, hedged about with taboos and guilt trips and mysticized by yoga.

Ross Douthat

#66. It's one thing to be asked to respect someone else's religion. It's another to be asked to respect their taboos.

Aaron Sorkin

#67. Now she is inviting you to a seminar at the university, where books are analyzed according to all Codes, Conscious and Unconscious, and in which all Taboos are eliminated, the ones imposed by the dominant Sex, Class, and Culture.

Italo Calvino

#68. Hindus and Westerners alike see in the meat-eating taboos of India a triumph of morals over appetite. This is a dangerous misrepresentation of cultural processes. Hindu vegetarianism was a victory not of spirit over matter but of reproductive over productive forces.

Marvin Harris

#69. Few people realize how much courage it takes in a community like ours to ignore the established taboos.

Dorothea Benton Frank

#70. What I find interesting is working in a society with certain taboos and fashion photography is about that kind of society. To have taboos, then to get around them that is interesting.

Helmut Newton

#71. Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

Georges Bataille

#72. Life is livable because we know that wherever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos.

Havelock Ellis

#73. Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.

Diego Rivera

#74. Mental health is one of the last great taboos.

Stephen Fry

#75. Taboos are falling across our culture like dominoes. What was unspeakable yesterday dominates talk shows today.

Ellen Goodman

#76. Everything teeters between pathos and bathos: here you are, violating society's most fundamental taboos and yet formaldehyde is a powerful appetite stimulant, so you also crave a burrito.

Paul Kalanithi

#77. Infinitely more taboos, on television.

Rod Serling

#78. The Donald has the political players rising on their hind legs in defense of their realm. And he has hitherto shattered the totems and taboos these players enforce. Debated as never before are vexations like immigration, Islam, and, yes, the legitimacy of the Republican National Committee.

Ilana Mercer

#79. I went to art school, and every Tuesday and Friday we drew the nude. If you look at Western painting, male and female nudes are in the center of every painting. It's difficult and exciting to draw the nude. Why get so upset about this? It's our duty to break taboos.

Peter Greenaway

#80. I've done Graham Norton's show three times now. He tackles taboos and subject matter that wouldn't make it past the censors in the States.

Kyle MacLachlan

#81. The open society is one in which men have learned to be to some extent critical of taboos, and to base decisions on the authority of their own intelligence.

Karl Popper

#82. This ( ... ) had made me aware for the first time of the well-disguised myth that they and the academic institutions they represent are bastions of a free exchange of ideas. They are -but only of those ideas that don't 'rock the boat', that refrain from challenging hallowed taboos.

Jack Kevorkian

#83. Both magic and religion are based strictly on mythological tradition, and they also both exist in the atmosphere of the miraculous, in a constant revelation of their wonder-working power. They both are surrounded by taboos and observances which mark off their acts from those of the profane world.

Bronislaw Malinowski

#84. Somebody must trespass on the taboos of modern nationalism, in the interests of human reason. Business can't. Diplomacy won't. It has to be people like us.

Robert Byron

#85. I do think most poets are in denial about what the real taboos in writing are
the real boundaries.

Katy Lederer

#86. When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

Madeleine M. Kunin

#87. Freedom is for the curious ones. Free is the one not influenced by taboos. Free is the one who reasons and evolves continuously, and refuses to accept anything without thinking.

Massimo Marino

#88. To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.

Camille Paglia

#89. Taboos are always going to be interesting.Our [ with Michael Dumontier] style has its range and there is room for explicitness in violence, but not at the expense of our classy, highbrow image.

Neil Farber

#90. He had a sadness in his eyes that Carrie recognised as regret.

Kassandra Cross

#91. Getting paid for being laid, guess that's the name of the game.

Elton John

#92. If we can hump dead animals and antelopes, there's no reason that a man and another man can't elope.

Eminem

#93. I'm a virgin Mr Cohen," Carrie said, "I've never been with a man before.

Kassandra Cross

#94. Rudolf Valentino looks very much alive and he looks up ladies dresses as they sadly pass him by.

Ray Davies

#95. Gold will never free your father, the price, my dear, is you instead.

Bob Dylan

#96. I'm in love with my second cousin.

Bob Dylan

#97. I lay my head on the wheel and the horn begins honking, the whole neighborhood knows that I'm home drunk again.

George Jones

#98. If one is talking about a vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse language; one is less likely to be seduced into excusing it.

G.K. Chesterton

#99. Maybe I'll make a huge color tapestry from my belly button lint.

Al Yankovic

#100. How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God's will and another is just cultural differences? What if it's all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?

Trevor D. Richardson