Quotes & Sayings About Four Letter Words

The more repression there is, the more need there is for irreverence toward those who are responsible for that repression. But too often sarcasm passes for irony, name-calling passes for insight, bleeped-out four-letter words pass for wit, and lowest-common-denominator jokes pass for analysis. Satire should have a point of view. It doesn't have to get a belly laugh. It does have to present criticism. — Paul Krassner

Ya better come inside
when you're ready to
but no chance if ya don't wanna dance
you like four letter words when you're ready to
but then you won't 'cos you know that you can
— Def Leppard

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

It's not real. Love is a product of habit and routine. If you break that habit and change those routines, the person you've loved and lost and can't live without suddenly becomes an easy memory to file in the back of your mind . In other words, love isn't a heart condition. It's not even an emotional one. It's just a four-letter word we use when we want to control someone else and ruin their life if we ever decide to walk out on them — Morgan Parker

The lesser of the evils now before us is to abandon all moral censorship. We have either sunk beneath or risen above it. If we do, there will be reams of filth. But we need not read it. Nor, probably, will the fashion last for ever. Four-letter words may soon be as dated as antimacassars. — C.S. Lewis

Today's comics use four-letter words as a shortcut to thinking. They're shooting for that big laugh and it becomes a panic thing, using four-letter words to shock people. — Red Skelton

My mother won't tolerate any four-letter words. — Dixie Carter

As someone who grew up in the Bronx, I certainly learned my share of four-letter words, but none are more powerful than nice. — Linda Kaplan Thaler

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Senator John Kerry, who is running for president, said that when he voted for the war in Iraq, he didn't expect President Bush to 'f
it up as badly as he did.' Here's some breaking news, tomorrow former Vice President Al Gore expected to endorse Howard Dean as the Democratic nominee for president of the United States - and you thought John Kerry was using four letter words before! Actually, to John Kerry, Dean is a four letter word. — Jay Leno

There are four-letter words you should never use in business. They're not fuck or shit. They're need, must, can't, easy, just, only and fast. These words gets in the way of healthy communication — Jason Fried

Did that hurt? On your lip?"
"Not too much. I said a few choice four-letter words, though. — Tammara Webber

If written in the three-letter words of the four-letter alphabet,a human being is determined by a genetic narrative long enough to fill the equivalent of 500 Bibles.In the meantime human beings have discovered this for themselves. That's right. They have uncovered our profoundest concept
namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books. — Harry Mulisch

You have to know how to be vulgar. Paint with four-letter words. — Pablo Picasso

Less fear; more hope: just four little four-letter words, but when they are vividly felt as emotion, they are behavior changing, life changing, world-changing. — Louis Tice

They call it golf because all the other four letter words were taken. — Raymond Floyd

If this letter system works, it should be reproducible and consistent. If this letter system works, it should be demonstrated in biblical narrative - with consistency. It has. It does. It will. For instance: Daniel interpreted the handwriting on the Babylonian wall. (Da 5:1-31) The question has always been, "What method would produce the same interpretation?"
If you will pull out your Strong's Concordance and translate those same four words, you won't get the same results that Daniel got. Was Daniel using a different method than modern Christians? Yes, obviously. — Michael Ben Zehabe

Alas. What have we done to our good, bawdy, Anglo-Saxon four-letter words? ... We have blunted them so with overuse that they no longer have any real meaning for us ... When will we be able to redeem our shock words? They have been turned to marshmallows ... We no longer have anything to cry in time of crisis. 'Help!' we bleat. And no one hears us. 'Help' is another of those four-letter words that don't mean anything any more. — Madeleine L'Engle

Love is a four-letter word, but you don't hear in nearly as often as you hear some other four-letter words. It may be a sign of our times that everyone talks openly about sex, but we seem to be embarrassed to talk about love. — Thomas Sowell

Love and lust are both four letter words that start with L, but they don't appear in the dictionary side by side so we shouldn't have to think they go hand in hand in life. — LaToya Hankins

People enjoy sitting back knowing they won't hear a lot of four-letter words. — Tim Conway

She knew all sorts of four letter words now; they just weren't the ones that most people considered foul language.
Love.
Help.
Rape.
Stop.
Then. — Jodi Picoult

And then Ehrlich's climax: "Let there be light. Let there be honesty. Let there be no running from nonexistent destroyers of morals. Let there be honest understanding. In the end the four-letter words will not appear draped in glaring headlights, but will be submerged in the decentralization of small thinking in small minds. — Ronald K.L. Collins

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain unless you've used up all the other four-letter words. — W.C. Fields

I began in an era where four-letter words were not allowed. — Pat Morita

There are few other four-letter words that hold us all in as much thrall as love. — The Editors Of O, The Oprah Magazine

My favorite four-letter words are 'hard work'. — John Wayne

And it's beyond my energy to explain why I don't think that four-letter word that everyone's so obsessed over and that gets everyone into so much trouble and pretty much makes everyone behave like an ass can live in a place like this. Somewhere during dry cleaning, details, and missed meals, it flakes away and what you're left with is married people with a tolerable affinity for each other. That little four-letter word can exist only in poetry, or movies of 2 to 3 hours in length. Maybe in a mini-series.
This place of dull details and irksome obligations is a home only to other four-letter words, which are used much more frequently. — Kendare Blake

If something comes along that you don't like, there are a few sort of four-letter words that you can use to push it out of the sphere of discussion. If you were in a bar downtown, they might have different words, but if you're an educated person what you use are complicated words like "conspiracy theory" or "Marxist." It's a way of pushing unpleasant questions off the agenda so that we can continue in our own happy ideology. — Noam Chomsky

Trap is a four-letter word, and like so many four-letter words it can mean something entirely else.
--Hugo Anstead — Jennifer A. Girardin

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misplaced even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those left behind filed desultory missing- persons reports, then moved on themselves. — Joan Didion

I can't say what my first thought was as I sunk below the surface, because it was mostly a string of four-letter words. — Rachel Hawkins

Four-letter words have always offended me. I cringe at hearing them. Can't, don't, and won't are the worst. — Richelle E. Goodrich

Fear is only a four letter word. — Jeff Hardy

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose ... anything goes. — Cole Porter

A single word that can be offensive to someone is a horrible thing for anyone who has iman. In other words, filthy language out of your mouth and faith inside your heart cannot coexist. You cannot have iman in your heart and ugly words come out of your mouth. If you have no control over whatever four letter words you keep using every time you get frustrated, there's a spiritual problem, it's not just a habit problem.
How can you use a terrible word for anyone who has iman? — Nouman Ali Khan

Having completed its conquest of California in 1844, the United States looked across the Pacific for new business opportunities. In 1853, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo (then called Edo) Bay with four men-of-war, and handed over a letter for the Japanese emperor from the American president which began with the ominous words, 'You know that the United States of America now extend from sea to sea.' Denied an audience with the emperor, Perry retreated with subtle threats to return with more firepower if the Japanese did not agree to open their ports to American trade. They refused. He did as he said; and the Japanese succumbed. — Pankaj Mishra

The very opposite of freedom is cliche, and nothing is less free, more inert with convention and hollow brutality, than a row of four-letter words. — George Steiner

There are only two four letter words that are offense to men. The words don't and stop. Well, unless they are used together. — Christine Zolendz

Inevitably, the flood of literary pornography loosed on us is dulling our reactions of surprise or shock. Its writers are forced to raise the ante, to provide stronger and stronger stimulants. Or try to provide them, since both the manner, the naming of parts and the few inexpressive four-letter words, and the matter, are narrowly limited. — Storm Jameson

I can see that an insufficent, or perhaps even defective, socialization process has led you to believe that four-letter words add power to languauge — Douglas Preston

Now she said, "I'm up to the four-letter words." And I said, "You mean the dirty ones, like shit?" And she laughed and said, "Worse ones than that." And I said, "You mean the c-word and the f-word?" and she said, "No. Like love. — Margaret Atwood

It took me a good thirty minutes to find Cal. That was actually a good thing, because it gave me plenty of time to come up with something to say to him that wasn't just a string of four-letter words.
There are a lot of freaky things witches and warlocks do, obviously, but the arranged marriage thing was one of the grossest. When a witch is thirteen, her parents hook her up with an available warlock, based on things like compatible powers and family alliances. The entire thing is so eighteenth century.
As I stomped across school grounds, all I could see was Cal sitting with my dad in some manly room with leather chairs and dead animals on the wall, chomping on cigars as Dad formally signed me away to him.They probably even high-fived.
Okay,so it's not like either of them are exactly the cigar-and-high-fives type, but still. — Rachel Hawkins

I won't go to movies with permissiveness, four-letter words, or violence. Show me 'E.T.' and 'Chariots of Fire' instead. That's entertainment, not exploitation of the human body. — Ginger Rogers