Taboos Quotes

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Quotes About Taboos

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Got 27 children I never see. ~ Tom Waits
Taboos quotes by Tom Waits
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. 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, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death
ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. ~ James Baldwin
Taboos quotes by James Baldwin
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
Taboos quotes by George Watsky
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
Taboos quotes by Marvin Harris
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
Taboos quotes by George Soros
To be risen with Christ means not only that one has a choice and that one may live by a higher law - the law of grace and love - but that one must do so. The first obligation of the Christian is to maintain their freedom from all superstitions, all blind taboos and religious formalities, indeed from all empty forms of legalism. ~ Thomas Merton
Taboos quotes by Thomas Merton
There was this long lovely dancer in a little club downtown, love to watch her do her stuff. ~ Bob Seger
Taboos quotes by Bob Seger
Sexuality with all its attendant yearnings and pains, jealousies and taboos, is the most disturbing impulse humans have. ~ John Steinbeck
Taboos quotes by John Steinbeck
...human beings need someone friendly to listen to them when they're grieving. So feel free to talk to me. I will be friendly. You have nice shoes."
"Is that the only thing you notice about people?"
"I've always wanted shoes. They're the sole piece of clothing that makes any sense, assuming ideal environmental conditions. They don't play into your strange and nonsensical taboos about not letting anyone see your - "
"Is this really the only thing you can think of to comfort someone who is grieving?"
"It was number one on my list." Great.
"The list has seven million entries. Do you want to hear number two?"
"Is it silence?"
"That didn't even make the list."
"Move it to number two."
"All right, I . . . Oh. ~ Brandon Sanderson
Taboos quotes by Brandon Sanderson
Even when a prohibition in a fairy-story is guessed to be derived from some taboo once practised long ago, it has probably been preserved in the later stages of the tale's history because of the great mythical significance of prohibition. A sense of significance may indeed have lain behind some of the taboos themselves. Thou shalt not - or else thou shalt depart beggared into endless regret. The gentlest 'nursery-tales' know it. Even Peter Rabbit was forbidden a garden, lost his blue coat, and took sick. The Locked Door stands as an eternal Temptation. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
Taboos quotes by J.R.R. Tolkien
Almost all of my early art dealt with the fallout from middle-class taboos, the messy, the ambivalent emotions couples felt, the inherent racism, the sexual tensions and the unhappiness roiling below the surface of our prim suburban lives. Meanwhile I was a suburban bad boy - cynical, sarcastic, contemptuous of all authority. ~ Eric Fischl
Taboos quotes by Eric Fischl
The trick to this solution is that you'd have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked - more like unarmed. Defenseless. 'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' - this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to "Do you like me? Please like me," which you know quite well that 99% of all interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obsene. In fact one of the very last few interperonal taboos we have is kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. That's how it'll look to the reader. And it will have to. There's no way around it. ~ David Foster Wallace
Taboos quotes by David Foster Wallace
What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behaviour, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that. Art is memory - which is quite different [from] history. Art asks that we remember who we are, and usually that asking has to come as provocation - which is why art breaks the rules and the taboos, and at the same time is a moral force. ~ Jeanette Winterson
Taboos quotes by Jeanette Winterson
I think historically modern economics, capitalist economics, tends to erode moral categories ... And this is where I think the right gets capitalism wrong. They kind of assume that there is a moral equivalence or moral valence to capitalism, but I tend to think that economics erodes all the kind of cultural taboos and inhibitions and values it comes into contact with. ~ Michael Pollan
Taboos quotes by Michael Pollan
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
Taboos quotes by Nguyen Minh Triet
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
Taboos quotes by Peter Greenaway
Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. ~ John Le Carre
Taboos quotes by John Le Carre
Good horror fiction deals with taboos. It must always go to the limits of what is acceptable. ~ Clive Barker
Taboos quotes by Clive Barker
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
Taboos quotes by Robert Cormier
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
Taboos quotes by Simon R. Green
It's two o'clock in the morning, they're not going to get any nooky anyway, so this one guy and the guy with the t-shirt guy started sniffing the girls panties. ~ Frank Zappa
Taboos quotes by Frank Zappa
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
Taboos quotes by Elizabeth Ashley
I lay my head on the wheel and the horn begins honking, the whole neighborhood knows that I'm home drunk again. ~ George Jones
Taboos quotes by George Jones
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
Taboos quotes by Alan Watts
They call him the Streak, he likes to turn the other cheek. He's always making the news, wearing just his tennis shoes. ~ Ray Stevens
Taboos quotes by Ray Stevens
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
Taboos quotes by Bronislaw Malinowski
What remains of the old Protestant fundamentalism is politics: abortion, gays, evolution. these issues are what binds congregations together. but even here things have changed as Americans have become more tolerant of many of these social taboos. Today many fundamentalist churches take nominally tough positions on, say, homosexuality but increasingly do little else for fear of offending the average believer, whom one schollar calls the "unchurched Harry". All it really takes to be a fundamentalist these days is to watch the TV shows, go to the theme parks, buy Christian rock, and vote Republican. The Sociologist Mark Shilbey, calls it the Californication of conservative Protestantism. ~ Fareed Zakaria
Taboos quotes by Fareed Zakaria
The taboos that I have mentioned are extraordinarily harsh and numerous. They stand around nearly every subject that is genuinely important to man: they hedge in free opinion and experimentation on all sides. Consider, for example, the matter of religion. It is debated freely and furiously in almost every country in the world save the United States, but here the critic is silenced. The result is that all religions are equally safeguarded against criticism, and that all of them lose vitality. We protect the status quo, and so make steady war upon revision and improvement. ~ H.L. Mencken
Taboos quotes by H.L. Mencken
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
Taboos quotes by Havelock Ellis
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
Taboos quotes by Elizabeth George
All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. 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. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are. ~ H.L. Mencken
Taboos quotes by H.L. Mencken
It is taboo in our society to criticize a persons religious faith ... these taboos are offensive, deeply unreasonable, but worse than that, they are getting people killed. This is really my concern. My concern is that our religions, the diversity of our religious doctrines, is going to get us killed. I'm worried that our religious discourse- our religious beliefs are ultimately incompatible with civilization. ~ Sam Harris
Taboos quotes by Sam Harris
This brings me to the question of the antiquity of the belief in fairies and to the associated problem of the existence of strata or stages in fairy belief. The antiquity of the belief is revealed by the wide distribution of tales concerning fairies, while it is also indicated by the antipathy of the elves to iron and salt - ancient taboos both. Not only so, but many traits respecting fairies, especially shape-shifting and the belief in their semi-corporeal state, are eloquent of primitive notions. That the process of the fairy belief witnessed more than one stage of development in the course of successive ages appears more than probable. 'The fairies of one race,' remarks Wentz, 'are the people of the preceding race.' If this statement lacks a certain precision, one realizes the implication; that is, that the ghosts or gods of a preceding race may come to be regarded by their successors as fairies. ~ Lewis Spence
Taboos quotes by Lewis Spence
Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo. ~ Michael Pollan
Taboos quotes by Michael Pollan
You Are What You Eat

Take food for example. We all assume that our craving or disgust is due to something about the food itself - as opposed to being an often arbitrary response preprogrammed by our culture. We understand that Australians prefer cricket to baseball, or that the French somehow find Gerard Depardieu sexy, but how hungry would you have to be before you would consider plucking a moth from the night air and popping it, frantic and dusty, into your mouth? Flap, crunch, ooze. You could wash it down with some saliva beer.How does a plate of sheep brain's sound? Broiled puppy with gravy? May we interest you in pig ears or shrimp heads? Perhaps a deep-fried songbird that you chew up, bones, beak, and all? A game of cricket on a field of grass is one thing, but pan-fried crickets over lemongrass? That's revolting.

Or is it? If lamb chops are fine, what makes lamb brains horrible? A pig's shoulder, haunch, and belly are damn fine eatin', but the ears, snout, and feet are gross? How is lobster so different from grasshopper? Who distinguishes delectable from disgusting, and what's their rationale? And what about all the expectations? Grind up those leftover pig parts, stuff 'em in an intestine, and you've got yourself respectable sausage or hot dogs. You may think bacon and eggs just go together, like French fries and ketchup or salt and pepper. But the combination of bacon and eggs for breakfast was dreamed up about a hundred years aqo by an advertis ~ Christopher Ryan
Taboos quotes by Christopher  Ryan
Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality. ~ Diego Rivera
Taboos quotes by Diego Rivera
Because I'm a performer I can justify and sometimes sell the things about me that offend and shock the conventional world. I need to live life in the fast lane. I need to do things to excess. I need to go over the edge. I have an obligation to experience the things most people can't experience. The taboos. The things you're not supposed to know or do. That's part of my job. That's why I do it. I would probably do it anyway. ~ Elizabeth Ashley
Taboos quotes by Elizabeth Ashley
Deprive the taboo rules of their original context, and they at once are apt to appear as a set of arbitrary prohibitions, as indeed they characteristically do appear when the initial context is lost, when those background beliefs in the light of which the taboo rules had originally been understood have not only been abandoned but forgotten.
In such a situation the rules have been deprived of any status that can secure their authority, and, if they do not acquire some new status quickly, both their interpretation and their justification become debatable. When the resources of a culture are too meagre to carry through the task of reinterpretation, the task of justification becomes impossible. Hence perhaps the relatively easy, although to some contemporary observers astonishing, victory of Kamehameha II over the taboos (and the creation thereby of a vacuum in which the banalities of the New England Protestant missionaries were received all too quickly). ~ Alasdair MacIntyre
Taboos quotes by Alasdair MacIntyre
A conversation between a person of my age and one of hers is like a map of a maze: There are things that each of us knows, and that each of us knows the other knows, that can be talked about. But there are things that each of us knows that the other doesn't know we know, which must not be spoken of, no matter what. Because of our ages, and for reasons of decency, there are what Daffy would refer to as taboos: forbidden topics which we may stroll among like islands of horse dung in the road that, although perfectly evident to both of us, must not be mentioned or kicked at any cost.
It's a strange world when you come right down to it. ~ Alan Bradley
Taboos quotes by Alan Bradley
There have been only two taboos in the world: sex and death. It is very strange why sex and death have been the two taboos not to be talked about, to be avoided. They are deeply connected. Sex represents life because all life arises out of sex, and death represents the end. And both have been taboo - don't talk about sex and don't talk about death. ~ Rajneesh
Taboos quotes by Rajneesh
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
Taboos quotes by Rene Konig
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
Taboos quotes by George Carlin
In the end the secrecy of your revolt poisons you like a secret disease. Your whole life is a life of lies. Year after year you sit in Kipling-haunted little Clubs, whisky to right of you, Pink'un to left of you, listening and eagerly agreeing while Colonel Bodger develops his theory that these bloody Nationalists should be boiled in oil. You hear your Oriental friends called 'greasy Little babus', and you admit, dutifully, that they are greasy little babus. You see louts fresh from school kicking grey-haired servants. The time comes when you burn with hatred of your own countrymen, when you long for a native rising to drown their Empire in blood. And in this there is nothing honourable, hardly even any sincerity. For, au fond, what do you care if the Indian Empire is a despotism, if Indians are bullied and exploited? You only care because the right of free speech is denied you. You are a creature of the despotism, a pukka sahib, tied tighter than a monk or a savage by an unbreakable system of taboos. ~ George Orwell
Taboos quotes by George Orwell
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
Taboos quotes by Charles Simic
The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown
laughed at, persecuted and despised
playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority. ~ Tom Robbins
Taboos quotes by Tom Robbins
I like big escapist films. It's odd because the type of comedian I am and the things I do when I'm writing and directing myself usually deal with the darker side of the human psyche and excruciating social faux pas. I often deal in taboos and the subjects I do as a stand-up are quite challenging. But my film roles have been much more fun and escapist. ~ Ricky Gervais
Taboos quotes by Ricky Gervais
Mental health is one of the last great taboos. ~ Stephen Fry
Taboos quotes by Stephen Fry
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
Taboos quotes by Helmut Newton
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
Taboos quotes by Sarah Silverman
Was I still myself? If so, who was I? I wasn't really interested in knowing that. It had no sort of importance for me anymore. Some moorings had broken, some taboos had fallen, and a world of spells and anathemas was springing up from their ruins. What was terrifying about this whole affair was the ease with which I passed from one universe to another without feeling out of place. Such a smooth transition. I had gone to bed a docile, courteous boy, and I'd awakened with an inextinguishable rage lodged in my very flesh. I carried my hatred like a second nature; it was my armor and my shirt of Nessus, my pedestal and my stake; it was all that remained to me in this false, unjust, arid, and cruel life. ~ Yasmina Khadra
Taboos quotes by Yasmina Khadra
...for those who value stability, who fear transience, uncertainty, change, have erected a powerful system of stigmas and taboos against rootlessness, that disruptive, anti-social force, so that we mostly conform, we pretend to be motivated by loyalties and solidarities we do not really feel, we hide our secret identities beneath the false skins of those identities which bear the belongers' seal of approval. But the truth leaks out in our dreams; alone in our beds (because we are all alone at night, even if we do not sleep by ourselves), we soar, we fly, we flee. And in the waking dreams our societies permit, in our myths, our arts, our songs, we celbrate the non-belongers, the different ones, the outlaws, the freaks. What we forbid ourselves we pay good money to watch, in a playhouse or movie theatre, or to read about between the secret covers of a book. Our libraries, our palaces of entertainment tell the truth. The tramp, the assassin, the rebel, the thief, the mutant, the outcast, the delinquent, the devil, the sinner, the traveller, the gangster, the runner, the mask: if we did not recognize in them our least-fulfilled needs, we would not invent them over and over again, in every place, in every language, in every time. ~ Salman Rushdie
Taboos quotes by Salman Rushdie
Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptised backwards into ignorance and simplicity. ~ J.K. Rowling
Taboos quotes by J.K. Rowling
Stopping at her house is a neighbor boy with evil on his mind, cause he's been peeking in Angie's room at night through her window blind. ~ Helen Reddy
Taboos quotes by Helen Reddy
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
Taboos quotes by Ross Douthat
When people say, 'But what is acceptable in erotica?' I sometimes answer them by saying: there are certain taboos and limits in writing about sex as a positive, enjoyable, blissful, exciting activity. There are no taboos and limits whatsoever to describing the same sexual activities if they are traumatic, horrible, full of suffering and disgust. You can describe anything. ~ Senta Holland
Taboos quotes by Senta Holland
I also knew that, though I had never cared much what others thought of me and what I did, I would care even less in the future. And I realized that for the women's movement to succeed, many women had to be similarly free, not just from the terror of breaking taboos, but from the garden-variety fear of social disapproval as well. ~ Sonia Johnson
Taboos quotes by Sonia Johnson
Psychic change, as Todorov has recognized, subverted the genre in another way, by revoking the cultural taboos, the social censorship, that had prohibited the overt treatment of psychosexual themes, which then found covert expression in the supernatural tale. 'There is no need today to resort to the devil [or to posthumous reverie] in order to speak of excessive sexual desire, and none to resort to vampires in order to designate the attraction exerted by corpses: psychoanalysis, and the literature which is directly or indirectly inspired by it, deal with these matters in undisguised terms. The themes of fantastic literature have become, literally, the very themes of the psychological investigations of the last fifty years. ~ Howard Kerr
Taboos quotes by Howard Kerr
All taboos serve different human interests by avoiding those things which threaten to cause offence or distress ~ Kate Burridge
Taboos quotes by Kate Burridge
Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone's good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea. ~ Stephanie Coontz
Taboos quotes by Stephanie Coontz
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
Taboos quotes by Steven Pinker
I'm a virgin Mr Cohen," Carrie said, "I've never been with a man before. ~ Kassandra Cross
Taboos quotes by Kassandra Cross
It's also about integration: owning up to the parts of yourself, however much you might not like them. In the Real there are so many taboos that people are completely fragmented. That's the joke of it. They cling rigidly to the idea that they are one unique person, while they are busy hiding parts of themselves they can't accept. ~ Alan McCluskey
Taboos quotes by Alan McCluskey
There were a few compensations to having corporeal Aspect. Food (jam tarts were my favourites); drink (mostly wine and mead); setting things on fire; sex (although I was still extremely confused by all the taboos surrounding this - no animals, no siblings, no men, no married women, no demons - frankly, it was amazing to me that anyone had sex at all, with so many rules against it). ~ Joanne Harris
Taboos quotes by Joanne Harris
Those who see what's obvious aren't necessarily brighter than others. They're just more likely to observe that the emperor is naked. Like children, they see what's actually there. Their perceptions are less clouded by belief systems, taboos, habits of thought. One responsibility of management
an important one
is to call attention to the invisible obvious, pointing it out as a child does (sometimes to the embarrassment of adults). Doing so also requires supporting employees who take that risk, too, and other risks as well. ~ Richard Farson
Taboos quotes by Richard Farson
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
Taboos quotes by G.K. Chesterton
I wonder, for example, if the twins' piano training had given them the Tomaini brand of dexterity with hand jobs? Could a non-musician learn it? Could I?

Children stumble through these most critical acts with no real help from the elders who are so anxious to teach them everything else. We were given rules and taboos for the toilet, the sneeze, the eating of an artichoke. Papa taught us all a particular brush stroke for cleaning our teeth, a special angle for the pen in our hand, the exact words for greeting elders, with fine-tuned distinctions for male, female, show folk, customers, or tradesmen. The twins and Arty were taught to design an act, whether it lasted three minutes or thirty, to tease, coax, and startle a crowd, to build to crescendo and then disappear in the instant of climax. From what I have come to understand of life, this show skill, this talk-'em, sock-'em, knock-'em-flat information, is as close as we got to that ultimate mystery. I throw death aside. Death is not mysterious. We all understand death far too well and spend chunks of life resisting, ignoring, or explaining away that knowledge.

But this real mystery I have never touched, never scratched. I've seen the tigers with their jaws wide, their fangs buried in each other's throats, and their shadowed hides sizzling, tip to tip. I've seen the young norms tangled and gasping in the shadows between booths. I suspect that, even if I had begun as a norm, the saw-toothed yearning that w ~ Katherine Dunn
Taboos quotes by Katherine Dunn
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
Taboos quotes by Neil Farber
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
Taboos quotes by Julius Evola
Few people realize how much courage it takes in a community like ours to ignore the established taboos. ~ Dorothea Benton Frank
Taboos quotes by Dorothea Benton Frank
There are more and more taboos about calling something, anything, ugly. ~ Susan Sontag
Taboos quotes by Susan Sontag
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
Taboos quotes by Paul Kalanithi
You might find contradictory taboos. In one culture it might seem shocking to think x, while in another it was shocking not to. But I think usually the shock is on one side. In one culture x is ok, and in another it's considered shocking. My hypothesis is that the side that's shocked is most likely to be the mistaken one. ~ Paul Graham
Taboos quotes by Paul Graham
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
Taboos quotes by H.L. Mencken
American poetry is always about defining oneself individually,claiming one's right to be different and often to break taboos. ~ Diane Wakoski
Taboos quotes by Diane Wakoski
As men begin to grow civilized, they cease to be satisfied with mere taboos. ~ Bertrand Russell
Taboos quotes by Bertrand Russell
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
Taboos quotes by Johnny Carson
Individual customs and taboos do sometimes present particular problems - the Dennash, for example, have various rituals associated with passing faecal matter that require considerable space and equipment, as well as a priest. ~ Tom Melly
Taboos quotes by Tom Melly
If a man isn't willing to take some risk for his opinions, either his opinions are no good or he's no good ~ Ezra Pound
Taboos quotes by Ezra Pound
Naming things, breaking through taboos and denial is the most dangerous, terrifying, and crucial work. This has to happen in spite of political climates or coercions, in spite of careers being won or lost, in spite of the fear of being criticized, outcast, or disliked. I believe freedom begins with naming things. Humanity is preserved by it. ~ Eve Ensler
Taboos quotes by Eve Ensler
Today, fear of bloodshed is forcing us into recognizing new taboos: those of Muslims. ~ Patrick Chappatte
Taboos quotes by Patrick Chappatte
I can take about an hour on the tower of power, as long as I gets a little golden shower. ~ Frank Zappa
Taboos quotes by Frank Zappa
She gets a hundred for her body and a nickel for her soul. ~ Alice Cooper
Taboos quotes by Alice Cooper
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
Taboos quotes by Kathy Change
Gold will never free your father, the price, my dear, is you instead. ~ Bob Dylan
Taboos quotes by Bob Dylan
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
Taboos quotes by Freda Adler
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
Taboos quotes by Jack Kevorkian
We live amid falling taboos. In our crowded little hour of history we have seen how the prejudice of religion no longer can bar the way to the White House. Some of you may live to see the day when the prejudice of sex no longer places the Presidency beyond the reach of a greatly gifted American lady. Long before them, I hope you will see a woman member of the Supreme Court of the United States. In Congress and in our State Legislatures we need more women to bring their sensitive experience to the shaping of our decisions. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson
Taboos quotes by Lyndon B. Johnson
Even a festival of madness is bound to end at one point. Only loneliness and emptiness remain after a riotous festival. When it's over, the taboos that were lifted like magic will return like magic. I can hear the hour of taboos approaching step by step from far away. A lunatic, unable to deal with the aftermath of the festival, may send down a punishment of taboos. A night of madness may drive someone to madness. ~ Eunjin Jang
Taboos quotes by Eunjin Jang
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
Taboos quotes by Rupert Sheldrake
When the excessively shy force themselves to be forward, they are frequently surprisingly unsubtle and overdirect and even rude: they have entered an extreme region beyond their normal personality, an area of social crime where gradations don't count; unavailable to them are the instincts and taboos that booming extroverts, who know the territory of self-advancement far better, can rely on. ~ Nicholson Baker
Taboos quotes by Nicholson Baker
Sexual and domestic abuse are already romanticized in mainstream media without critical social commentary, if there is any commentary at all. Horror isn't there for you to consume and enjoy as a sadist, it's a radical subversion of social taboos made to literally horrify you. It's made to give you the perspective of victims who constantly have their voices silenced. ~ Christy Leigh Stewart
Taboos quotes by Christy Leigh Stewart
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
Taboos quotes by Alain De Botton
Rough boys I wanna bite and kiss you. ~ Pete Townshend
Taboos quotes by Pete Townshend
But now the rub for man. If sex is a fulfillment of his role as an animal in the species, it reminds him that he is nothing himself but a link in the chain of being, exchangeable with any other and completely expendable in himself. Sex represents, then, species consciousness and, as such, the defeat of individuality, of personality. But it is just this personality that man wants to develop: the idea of himself as a special cosmic hero with special gifts for the universe. He doesn't want to be a mere fornicating animal like any other-this is not a truly human meaning, a truly distinctive contribution to world life. From the very beginning, then, the sexual act represents a double negation: by physical death and of distinctive personal gifts. This point is crucial because it explains why sexual taboos have been at the heart of human society since the very beginning. They affirm the triumph of human personality over animal sameness. With the complex codes for sexual self-denial, man was able to impose the cultural map for personal immortality over the animal body. He brought sexual taboos into being because he needed to triumph over the body, and he sacrificed the pleasures of the body to the highest pleasure of all: self-perpetuation as a spiritual being through all eternity. This is the substitution that Roheim was really describing when he made his penetrating observation on the Australian aborigines: "The repression and sublimation of the primal scene is at the bottom of tot ~ Ernest Becker
Taboos quotes by Ernest Becker
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
Taboos quotes by Luc Delahaye
Infinitely more taboos, on television. ~ Rod Serling
Taboos quotes by Rod Serling
Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place? ~ Kate Millett
Taboos quotes by Kate Millett
Sexual expression is so powerful a way of bonding with others and so devastating a way of hurting others that it can never be reduced to a mere matter of personal preferences. Sexual desires have immense capacities to order or disorder the social world. Because of this, the social meanings and expressions of sexual desire, connections, and taboos are an organizing component of human societies: Who wants whom? Who belongs with whom? Who is forbidden to whom? What do infractions mean, and what are their consequences? ~ Rachel Adler
Taboos quotes by Rachel Adler
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
Taboos quotes by Theodore Dalrymple
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
Taboos quotes by Logan Pearsall Smith
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