Quotes & Sayings About Obscenity

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

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

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

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

I look like a hooker."
"A slut," I corrected. "Hookers have pastier complexions."
"The voice of experience, I'm sure. — Martyn V. Halm

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

But if "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder, so is "obscenity. — Sydney J. Harris

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts. — Brendan Gill

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

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

Nearly all ancient peoples worshiped sex in some form and ritual, and not the lowest people but the highest expressed their worship most completely [ ... ]. The sexual character and functions of primitive deities were held in high regard, not through any obscenity of mind, but through a passion for fertility in women and in the earth. Certain animals, like the bull and the snake, were worshiped as apparently possessing or symbolizing in a high degree the divine power of reproduction.
The snake in the story of Eden is doubtless a phallic symbol, representing sex as the origin of evil, suggesting sexual awakening as the beginning of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps insinuating a certain proverbial connection between mental innocence and bliss. — Will Durant

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate. — Bertrand Russell

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

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

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

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

The censors were so far gone as to find the following sentence obscene: 'The factory gate waited for the student workers, thrown open in longing.' What can I say? This obscenity verdict was handed down by a censor in response to my script for my 1944 film about a girls' volunteer corps, Ichiban utsukushiku (The Most Beautiful). I could not fathom what it was he found to be obscene about this sentence. Probably none of you can either. But for the mentally disturbed censor this sentence was unquestionably obscene. He explained that the word 'gate' very vividly suggested to him the vagina! For these people suffering from sexual manias, anything and everything made them feel carnal desire. Because they were obscene themselves, everything seen through their obscene eyes naturally became obscene. Nothing more or less than a case of sexual pathology. — Akira Kurosawa

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ritual worked. That is the most ghastly thing. I hold no particular brief for the rationality of the world, but that this vile obscenity should actually have the power to bring back the dead seems to me not merely a sign that the world is not rational, but that it is in fact entirely insane, a murderous lunatic gibbering in the corner of a padded cell. — Sarah Monette

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind. — D.H. Lawrence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He never once repeated himself and he never used either profanity or obscenity. (I learned later that he saved those for very special occasions, which this wasn't.) But he described our shortcomings, physical, mental, moral, and genetic, in great and insulting detail.
But somehow I was not insulted; I became greatly interested in studying his command of language. I wished that we had had him on our debate team. — Robert A. Heinlein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The purpose of college, to put this all another way, is to turn adolescents into adults. You needn't go to school for that, but if you're going to be there anyway, then that's the most important thing to get accomplished. That is the true education: accept no substitutes. The idea that we should take the first four years of young adulthood and devote them to career preparation alone, neglecting every other part of life, is nothing short of an obscenity. If that's what people had you do, then you were robbed. And if you find yourself to be the same person at the end of college as you were at the beginning - the same beliefs, the same values, the same desires, the same goals for the same reasons - then you did it wrong. Go back and do it again. — William Deresiewicz

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

We call it hypocrisy, but it is schizophrenia, a modest ranch-house life with Draconian military adventures; a land of equal opportunity where a white culture sits upon a Black; a horizontal community of Christian love and a vertical hierarchy of churches
the cross was well-designed! a land of family, a land of illicit heat; a politics of principle, a politics of property; nation of mental hygiene with movies and TV reminiscent of a mental pigpen; patriots with a detestation of obscenity who pollute their rivers; citizens with a detestation of government control who cannot bear any situation not controlled. The list must be endless, the comic profits are finally small
the society was able to stagger on like a 400-lb. policeman walking uphill because living in such an unappreciated and obese state it did not at least have to explode in schizophrenia
life went on. Boys could go patiently to church at home and wait their turn to burn villages in Vietnam. — Norman Mailer

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

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

It seems the door to permissiveness, the door to lewdness and vulgarity and obscenity swings only one way. It only opens farther and farther; it never seems to swing back. Individuals can choose to close it, but it is certain, historically speaking, that public appetite and public policy will not close it. No, in the moral realm the only real control you have is self-control. — Jeffrey R. Holland

What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable unmarried gipsy obscenity? What are you doing? — Ernest Hemingway,

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

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.

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

I obscenity in the milk of my shame. — Ernest Hemingway,

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

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

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

Burris answered with an obscenity, and suddenly he lunged at me. I saw him move a split second too late. He slammed me against the side of a building, cracking my head hard against the brick. With his right hand, he clamped my throat just below the Adam's apple and pincered hard. He was strong, even stronger than I expected, and he put his whole overdeveloped body into it. At the same time, he pinioned my left arm with his right shoulder and grabbed my right hand, just above the wrist, and jammed his right knee into the inside of my leg. Now I knew for sure he'd really been a Navy SEAL. He was doing everything by the book. Which was good, actually. — Joseph Finder

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

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

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

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

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 justices have constitutionally protected obscenity in libraries, filth over cable television, and now unlimited internet pornography. — Phyllis Schlafly

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

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

In the struggle to remain a complete person and to love from her fullness instead of her inadequacy a woman may appear hard. She may feel her early conditioning tugging her in the direction of surrender, but she ought to remember that she was originally loved for herself; she ought to hang on to herself and not find herself nagging, helpless, irritable and trapped. Perhaps I am not old enough yet to promise that the self-reliant woman is always loved, but she cannot be lonely as long as there are people in the world who need her joy and her strength, but certainly in my experience it has always been so. 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. A lover who comes to your bed of his own accord is more likely to sleep with his arms around you all night than a lover who has nowhere else to sleep. — Germaine Greer

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

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

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

Holden, for all his faults and Miller's complaints, was a decent guy. In over his head and only half aware of the fact, but Miller could think of more than one person who fit that bill. He was going to miss Alex's odd, affected drawl and Amos' casual obscenity. He was going to wonder if and how Naomi ever worked things out with her captain. — James S.A. Corey

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

Parents, just keep in mind that kids will always round off to the nearest obscenity.. — Ray Romano

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

Obscenity comes from grime. — Christopher Hitchens

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

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

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

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

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

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

I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.
The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist. — Lionel Shriver

They told me I was not to draw. — Mike Diana

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

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

Of course, it would help if the manwould keep his shirt on whenever he came into her unconscious mind. What kind of person didn't have the decency to keep himself clothed while barging into her dreams.
a little modesty went a long way.
Yeah, but clothes on a body so fine was its own form of obscenity.
shh, mind, have some decency yourself. — Sherrilyn Kenyon

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