Obscenity Quotes

What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it. ~ Irving Kristol

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

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

We've reached a point in American history when death has become almost the last obscenity. Have you noticed how many of us refuse to say 'he or she died'? We're far more likely to say 'she passed away,' as though death were a sterile process of modest preparation, followed by shrink-wrapping, then rapid transit - where? Well, elsewhere. In short, it's the single thing we're loath to discuss in public. ~ Will Schwalbe

I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. I screamed and I screamed and I swore - words I didn't know I knew - until Steven came out and stood, his hand resting on my shoulder, waiting until he could be sure that I would be silent again. He didn't understnad, you see. He hadn't worked it out yet. That Will would try again. That our lives would be spent in a state of constant vigilance, waiting for the next time, waiting to see what horror he could inflict upon himself. We would have to see the world through his eyes - the potential poisons, the sharp objects, the inventiveness with which he could finish the job that damned motorcyclist had started. Our lives had to shrink to fit around the potential for that one act. And he had the advantage - he had nothing else to think about, you see ? Two weeks later, I told Will, "Yes". Of course I did. What else could I have done ? ~ Jojo Moyes

I don't see [the jungle] so much erotic. I see it more full of obscenity. It's just - Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they sing. They just screech in pain. ~ Werner Herzog

There is something powerful in the whispering of obscenities, about those in power. There's something delightful about it, something naughty, secretive, forbidden, thrilling. It's like a spell, of sorts. It deflates them, reduces them to the common denominator where they can be dealt. ~ Margaret Atwood

Nothing is more obscene to me than the glorification of suffering. ~ Marty Rubin

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

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.

A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses ... : this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wiresto the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ. ~ Jean Baudrillard

History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity. ~ Holbrook Jackson

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

Just as violence is the last refuge of the inarticulate, so it is also the first resort of the incompetent, the easy out for the man who is capable of expressing himself only in the most primitive and vulgar of dramatic terms. He leaves us with only the obscenity of violence per se - and the pornographer thereof will always be with us, in film as in any other medium. And so will his audience. ~ Judith Crist

In the drawing room [of the Queen's palace] hung a Venus and Cupid by Michaelangelo, in which, instead of a bit of drapery, the painter has placed Cupid's foot between Venus's thighs. Queen Caroline asked General Guise, an old connoisseur, if it was not a very fine piece? He replied Madam, the painter was a fool, for he has placed the foot where the hand should be. ~ Horace Walpole

The author relates that the word "OBSCENE" springs from the concept in Greek drama that certain actions would be performed outside the scene or off the stage. He clarifies that the Greeks did not shy away from shocking actions, but they knew that portraying them in the audience's view would drown out the emotional subtlety of the character development and ethical dilemmas. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

Interestingly, the historic case of 1868 in England that first defined obscenity-known among lawyers as the Hicklin decision- evolved out of the prosecution of a pamphlet describing how priests were often so sexually aroused while hearing women's confessions that they sometimes masturbated and even copulated with their repentant subjects in the confessional. ~ Gay Talese

A: There is no grand scheme of things.
B: If there were a grand scheme of things, the fact – the fact – that we are not equipped to perceive it, either by natural or supernatural means, is a nightmarish obscenity.
C: The very notion of a grand scheme of things is a nightmarish obscenity. ~ Thomas Ligotti

Staring at herself in the mirror, she found that she'd lost the ability to see herself through her own eyes. She was only what humans would see. Not a girl or a woman or someone in between. They wouldn't see her loneliness or fear or courage, let alone her humanity. They would see only obscenity. Calamity. ~ Laini Taylor

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

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

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

I know it when I see it
Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964), concurring op. ~ Justice Potter Stewart

That which attempts to elevate the ugly to the level of beauty becomes neither; but an obscenity. ~ John Donne

Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war. ~ Henry Miller

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

One can only pity those dirty little minds that see obscenity in the crotch of every tree. ~ Gerry Burnie

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

Man's inhumanity to man, unleashed, was an obscenity, and that obscenity was each person's own private responsibility. ~ Rosamunde Pilcher

Obscenities ... I think a lot of dumb people do it because they can't think of what they want to say and they're frustrated. A lot of smart people do it to pretend they aren't very smart - want to be just one of the boys. ~ Andy Rooney

Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism. ~ Sir John Woodroffe

It may be the first in what I trust will be a rapidly growing and influential genre
the novel designed on purpose to be excludedfrom the Booker short-list. ~ Angela Carter

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won't accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

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

The tree man eulogized them by screaming, 'And now get the hell out of here with your tree, you lousy bastards.'
Francie had heard swearing since she had heard words. Obscenity and profanity had no meaning as such among those people. They were emotional expressions of inarticulate people with small vocabularies; they made a kind of dialect. The phrases could mean many things according to the expression and tone used in saying them. So now, when Francie heard themselves called lousy bastards, she smiled tremulously at the kind man. She knew that he was really saying, 'Good-bye
God bless you. ~ Betty Smith

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

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

A rain of pebbles from overhead makes me glance up in time to see Ruthann step onto the lip of the cliff, another fifteen feet above me. Her body is wrapped tight in a pure white robe.

"Ruthann!" I shout, my voice caroming off the rock walls, an obscenity.

She looks down at me. Across the distance our eyes meet.

"Ruthann, don't," I whisper, but she shakes her head.

I'm sorry.

In that half-second, I think about Wilma and Derek and me, all the people who do not want to beleft behind, who think we know what is best for her. I think about the doctors and the medicines Ruthann lied about taking. I think about how I could talk her down from that ledge like I have talked down a dozen potential suicide victims. Yet the right thing to do, here, is subjective. Ruthann's family, who wants her alive, will not be the one to lose hair from drugs, to have surgery to remove her breast, to die by degrees. It is easy to say that Ruthann should come down from that cliff, unless you are Ruthann.

I know better than anyone what it feels like to have someone else make choices for you, when you deserve to be making them yourself.

I look at Ruthann, and very slowly, I not.

She smiles at me, and so I am her witness -- as she unwraps the wedding robe from her narrow shoulders and holds is across her back like the wide wings of a hawk. As she steps off the edge of the cliff and rises to the Spirit World. As t ~ Jodi Picoult

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

Well, that's a very interesting question," he said - to which he had no interesting or even sane answer. He simply conceded that if the Messiah came back and reconvened the Sanhedrin, well, then, yes - though mere mortals like ourselves might not see the wisdom of it - homosexuals, adulteresses, witches, and Sabbath breakers would be killed, and every other barbaric prescription found in the Old Testament would apply. As I was contemplating where on his person I should aim my vomit, he managed this final defense of his religion: "You just don't understand what an obscenity - what a sacrilege - these things would represent in the presence of the Messiah ~ Sam Harris

Obscenity is the distinguishing hallmark of a sadly limited vocabulary. ~ Gail Honeyman

What I feel for you is contempt. But it's nothing, compared to the contempt I feel for myself. I don't love you. I've never loved anyone. I wanted you from the first moment I saw you. I wanted you as one wants a whore - for the same reason and purpose. I spent two years damning myself, because I thought you were above a desire of this kind. You're not. You're as vile an animal as I am. I should loathe my discovering it. I don't. Yesterday, I would have killed anyone who'd tell me that you were capable of doing what I've had you do. Today, I would give my life not to let it be otherwise. Not to have you be anything but the bitch you are. All the greatness that I saw in you - I would not take it in exchange for the obscenity of your talent at an animal's sensation of pleasure. We were two great beings, you and I, proud of our strength, weren't we? Well this is all that's left of us - and I want no self-deception about it. ~ Ayn Rand

Commercial speech is like obscenity ... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it. ~ Jef I. Richards

Though not invariably the worst choice, war is always an obscene horror. ~ Ellen Glasgow

The prison guards are capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while. ~ Jean Harris

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

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.

And what else is erotic craving but a craving to be violated? In voluptuous turmoil, we are left not simply wounded, but shattered. The violent emotions that are aroused, that sense the obscenity in anguish, that push on in a momentum that can no longer derail or control itself, sense also the exultation of risking oneself, of plunging into the danger zone, of expending our forces at a loss. ~ Alphonso Lingis

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder. ~ Christopher Hitchens

I'm against suppression of pornography. If you suppress guns - yes; if you want to suppress poverty - yes. These are the obscenities, the real brutalization of people. I am almost more outraged by ads for blue jeans or cars that sort of blatantly depict women not only as sex objects, but women that look younger than the age of consent, looking like they've just been raped or asking to be raped-utterly passive sex objects. ~ Betty Friedan

If you don't care for obscenity, you don't care for the truth. ~ Tim O'Brien

Epidermal Macabre
Indelicate is he who loathes
The aspect of his fleshy clothes,-
The flying fabric stitched on bone,
The vesture of the skeleton,
The garment neither fur nor hair,
The cloak of evil and despair,
The veil long violated by
Caresses of the hand and eye.
Yet such is my unseemliness:
I hate my epidermal dress,
The savage blood's obscenity,
The rags of my anatomy,
And willingly would I dispense
With false accouterments of sense,
To sleep immodestly, a most
Incarnadine and carnal ghost. ~ Theodore Roethke

Manto had earlier been prosecuted in Lahore for obscenity, and one of the words alleged to have been obscene was, breasts ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

Clearly, it is time we learned to meet our emotional needs without embracing the preposterous. We must find ways to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity - birth, marriage, death - without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Muslim, or Jewish be widely recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world. ~ Sam Harris

Howard and Shirley were clothed, always, in an invisible layer of decorum that they never laid aside. ~ J.K. Rowling

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

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

Some entertainers have tried to make art of coarseness, but in their public crudeness they have merely revealed their own vast senses of personal inferiority. When they heap mud upon themselves and allow their tongues to wag with vulgarity, they expose their belief that they are not worth loving and in fact are unlovable. When we as an audience indulge then in their profanity, we are like the audience at the Roman Colosseum being thrilled as the raging lions kill the unarmed Christians. We not only participate in the humiliation of the entertainers, but we are brought low by sharing in the obscenity. We need to have the courage to say obesity is not funny and vulgarity is not amusing. Insolent children and submissive parents are not the characters we want to admire and emulate. Flippancy and sarcasm are not qualities which we need to include in our daily conversations. ~ Maya Angelou

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

Obscenity comes from grime. ~ Christopher Hitchens

When they told me in the hospital that Will would live, I walked outside into my garden and I raged. I raged at God, at nature, at whatever fate had brought our family to such depths. I was so furious, you see, that all around me were things that could move and bend and grow and reproduce, and my son - my vital, charismatic, beautiful boy - was just this thing. Immobile, wilted, bloodied, suffering. Their beauty seemed like an obscenity. ~ Jojo Moyes

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: What in God's name are you doing to yourself? ~ John Howard Griffin

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. ~ Tim O'Brien

I hang up and don't even need to look at Joshua. I know he's shaking his head.

After a few minutes I glance at him, and he is staring at me. Imagine it's two minutes before the biggest interview of your life, and you look down at your white shirt. Your peacock-blue fountain pen has leaked through your pocket. Your head explodes with an obscenity and your stomach is a spike of panic over the simmering nerves. You're an idiot and everything's ruined. That's the exact color of Joshua's eyes when he looks at me. ~ Sally Thorne

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

Inexpensive Progress

Encase your legs in nylons,
Bestride your hills with pylons
O age without a soul;
Away with gentle willows
And all the elmy billows
That through your valleys roll.

Let's say goodbye to hedges
And roads with grassy edges
And winding country lanes;
Let all things travel faster
Where motor car is master
Till only Speed remains.

Destroy the ancient inn-signs
But strew the roads with tin signs
'Keep Left,' 'M4,' 'Keep Out!'
Command, instruction, warning,
Repetitive adorning
The rockeried roundabout;

For every raw obscenity
Must have its small 'amenity,'
Its patch of shaven green,
And hoardings look a wonder
In banks of floribunda
With floodlights in between.

Leave no old village standing
Which could provide a landing
For aeroplanes to roar,
But spare such cheap defacements
As huts with shattered casements
Unlived-in since the war.

Let no provincial High Street
Which might be your or my street
Look as it used to do,
But let the chain stores place here
Their miles of black glass facia
And traffic thunder through.

And if there is some scenery,
Some unpretentious greenery,
Surviving anywhere,
It does not need protecting
For soon we'll be erecting
A Power Station there.

When all our roads are lighted
B ~ John Betjeman

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

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

The question that arises is this: had father hated the people on the ship, just as she now hates the motorcyclist and the man who mocked her because she covered her ears? No, Agnes cannot imagine that Father was capable of hatred. Hate traps us by binding us too tightly to our adversary. This is the obscenity of war: the intimacy of mutually shed blood, the lascivious proximity of two soldiers who, eye to eye, bayonet each other. Agnes was sure: it was precisely this kind of intimacy that her father found repugnant. The melee on the ship filled him with such disgust that he preferred to drown. ~ Milan Kundera

When somebody comes to your front door, and they're screaming obscenities at you and telling you to come outside, and you've had your life threatened several times, you take it pretty seriously. It's the reason I have a Rottweiler. ~ Willie Aames

If the security of the land
calls for a life without conscience
To imagine a word other than 'yes' is an obscenity
And the mind bends low before the lecherous times
then the security of the land is a threat to us

If the security of the land means
that every strike crushed makes that peace stronger
Martyrdom is no more than death at the borders
Art blooms only at the palace window
Intellect only drives the waterwheel that irrigates the ruler's crops
Labour is little more than a broom at the palace door
then the security of the land is a threat to us ~ Avtar Singh Sandhu (Pash)

Years ago in 1959 when Dellinger was already an editor on Liberation (then an anarchist-pacifist magazine, of worthy but not very readable articles in more or less vegetarian prose) Mailer had submitted a piece, after some solicitation, on the contrast between real obscenity in advertising, and alleged obscenity in four-letter words. The piece was no irreplaceable work of prose, and in fact was eventually inserted quietly into his book, Advertisements for Myself, but it created difficulty for the editorial board at Liberation, since there was a four-letter word he had used to make his point, the palpable four-letter word which signifies a woman's most definitive organ: these editorial anarchists were decorous; they were ready to overthrow society and replace it with a communion of pacifistic men free of all laws, but they were not ready to print cunt. ~ Norman Mailer

The Bible is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies. This Bible is built mainly out of fragments of older Bibles that had their day and crumbled to ruin. So it noticeably lacks in originality, necessarily. Its three or four most imposing and impressive events all happened in earlier Bibles; there are only two new things in it: hell, for one, and that singular heaven I have told you about. ~ Mark Twain

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

What is obscenity? And to whom? ~ Allen Ginsberg

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

The obscurity, incredibility and obscenity, so conspicuous in many parts of it, would justly condemn the works of a modern writer. It contains a mixture of inconsistency and contradiction; to call which the word of God, is the highest pitch of extravagance: it is to attribute to the deity that which any person of common sense would blush to confess himself the author of. ~ Elihu Palmer

The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest. ~ Fulton J. Sheen

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

8 April 1891
The obscenity of nostrils and mouths; the ignominious cupidity of smiles and women encountered in the street; the shifty baseness on every side, as of hyenas and wild beasts ready to bite: tradesmen in their shops and strollers on their pavements. How long must I suffer this? I have suffered it before, as a child, when, descending by chance to the servant's quarters, I overheard in astonishment their vile gossip, tearing up my own kind with their lovely teeth.

This hostility to the entire race, this muted detestation of lynxes in human form, I must have rediscovered it later while at school. I had a repugnance and horror for all base instincts, but am I not myself instinctively violent and lewd, murderous and sensual? Am I any different, in essence, from the members of the riotous and murderous mob of a hundred years ago, who hurled the town sergeants into the Seine and cried, 'String up the aristos!' just as they shout 'Down with the army!' or 'Death to the Jews! ~ Jean Lorrain

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

The obscenities of this country are not girls like you. It is the poverty which is obscene, and the criminal irresponsibility of the leaders who make this poverty a deadening reality. The obscenities in this country are the places of the rich, the new hotels made at the expense of the people, the hospitals where the poor die when they get sick because they don't have the money either for medicines or services. It is only in this light that the real definition of obscenity should be made. ~ F. Sionil Jose

When science shall have effectually demonstrated to us the origin of matter, and proved the fallacy of the occultists and old philosophers who held (as their descendants now hold) that matter is but one of the correlations of spirit, then will the world of skeptics have a right to reject the old Wisdom, or throw the charge of obscenity in the teeth of the old religions. ~ H. P. Blavatsky

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

I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone ... I think, myself, that it is an obscenity ... ~ Desmond Tutu

Taking a close look at - at what's around us there - there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of... overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle - Uh, we in comparison to that enormous articulation - we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban... novel... a cheap novel. We have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication... overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the - the stars up here in the - in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it. I love it very much. But I love it against my better judgment. ~ Werner Herzog

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art - or almost the only stuff. ~ D.H. Lawrence

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

Anger has become one of the trendiest emotions of all. In moderation it can be a righteous force for constructive change. But its hackneyed omnipresence means the vast majority of its outbreaks are trivial. The paucity of colorful obscenities is aggravated by an abundance of frivolous fury. ~ Rob Brezsny

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

Profanity and obscenity entitle people who don't want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

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

There are many things that men and women ought to think about, and must think about, in private, that they would not for a moment discuss in public. There are books on the proper conduct of women in certain most sacred relations of life, relations of life which are as holy as any, and which can be entered into in the presence of a holy God with no question of His approval, but which do not permit of public mention. . . .

That the Bible is a pure book is evidenced by the fact that it is not a favourite book in dens of infamy. But on the other hand, books that try to make out that the Bible is an obscene book, and that endeavour to keep people from reading it, are favourite books in dens of infamy. The unclean classes, both men and women, were devoted admirers of the most brilliant man this country ever produced who attacked what he called the "obscenity of the Bible." These unclean classes do not frequent Bible classes. They do frequent infidel lectures.

These infidel objectors to the book as an "obscene book" constantly betray their insincerity and hypocrisy. Colonel Ingersoll . . . objected to the Bible for telling these vile deeds "without a touch of humour." In other words, he did not object to telling stories of vice, if only a joke was made of the sin. Thank God, that is exactly what the Bible does not do--make a joke of sin. It makes sin hideous, so men who are obscene in their own hearts object to the Bible as being an obscene book. . . .

R.A. Torrey

(The National Cancer Program is) a bunch of (obscenity). ~ James D. Watson

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

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

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

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

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