Explore the wonderful quotes under this tag
Slang in a woman's mouth is not obscene, it only sounds so.
Sep 29, 2025
The United States is a special case, and for me, very interesting. It's studied carefully and we know a lot about it. One of the most striking features of the elections is the class-based character of the vote. Now, class is not discussed or even measured in the United States. In fact, the word is almost obscene, except for the term "middle class." And you can't get exact class data; the census doesn't even give class data. But you can sort of see the significance of it just from income figures.
I think it's sad that we live in a world where men can steal and distribute and publish photos of women without their permission all over the Internet and even in print and make a lot of money doing so, but half naked photos that I took of myself are deemed "obscene."
There is in fact something obscene and sinister about photography, a desire to imprison, to incorporate, a sexual intensity of pursuit.
I always said God was against art and I still believe it.
It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.
So much of my work involved the Vietnam War that it would have been obscene to show it in a gallery. But now, it’s different; it’s important to remember and to enable the young to discover what to some of us is still so present.
I'd never touch anything. I think it's foolhardy to play around with the face that you've been given. To have a little snip or a tuck, I think, is really quite obscene.
That I ever think for one minute that I should ever feel lonely is obscene and unreasonable.
I find that if you take the various popular song forms to their logical extremes, you can arrive at almost anything from the ridiculous to the obscene-or, as they say in New York, sophisticated.
When the commission finds that a pig has entered the parlor, the exercise of its regulatory power does not depend on proof the pig is obscene.
At school any spontaneous act was likely to get me into trouble. I learned never to act on impulse, and that whatever came into my mind first should be rejected in favour of better ideas. I learned that my imagination Wasn’t ‘good’ enough. I learned that the first idea was unsatisfactory because it was (1) psychotic; (2) obscene; (3) unoriginal. The truth is that the best ideas are often psychotic, obscene and unoriginal.
I don't care if you're obscene, filthy, horrendous -- as long as you're honest.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene.
There's nothing so obscene and depressing as an American Christmas.
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.
In the godforsaken, obscene quicksand of life, there is a deafening alleluia rising from the souls of those who weep, and of those who weep with those who weep. If you watch, you will see The hand of God putting the stars back in their skies one by one.
Some will protest that in a world with so much human suffering, it is something between eccentric and obscene to mourn a dog. I think not. After all, it is perfectly normal—indeed, deeply human—to be moved when nature presents us with a vision of great beauty. Should we not be moved when it produces a vision—a creature—of the purest sweetness?
I've been told that I am evil. I've been told that I am behind the persecution of millions of Americans. That I have encouraged hate toward gays. I've received both very brief and obscene messages, and very long and literate messages that tell me a vote for Crash was vote for homophobia.
I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East.
We all agree that parents have the primary responsibility of filtering the material that reaches children. However, children are often lured onto websites containing obscene material through the devious manipulation of search engines.
There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.
The fashion industry certainly has its obscene sides. The cost of a coat can be obscene. So can the cost of a photo shoot if you're working with a really good photographer.
They're [[harmaceuticals companies] just making a killing out of people's death. And they're benefiting by people's suffering. And I find that obscene. I find it ridiculous in this day and age, that that would happen. And it took President Clinton to go to rogue pharmaceutical companies to copy the antiretroviral drugs for a fraction of the cost.
Out in Hollywood, where the streets are paved with Goldwyn, the word "sophisticate" means, very simply, "obscene." A sophisticatedstory is a dirty story. Some of that meaning was wafted eastward and got itself mixed up into the present definition. So that a "sophisticate" means: one who dwells in a tower made of a DuPont substitute for ivory and holds a glass of flat champagne in one hand and an album of dirty post cards in the other.
The only thing that is obscene is censorship.
To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.
I celebrate myself," the poet Walt Whitman wrote. The thought is so delicious it is almost obscene. Imagine the joy that would come with celebrating the self — our achievements, our experiences, our existence. Imagine what it would be like to look into the mirror and say, as God taught us, "That's good.
When table utensils were invented in the 1100s, the Catholic Church condemned them as obscene and heretical, claiming, 'God gave us fingers with which to eat.' And we're supposed to get politically discouraged? Oh please. We're being opposed by people who denounced the fork.
But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
Before, I'd photograph anything. I didn't think there was anything more or less obscene about any part of the body.
The most important truths always appear first as blasphemies or obscenities. That's why every great innovator is persecuted. And the sacraments look obscene, too, to an outsider. The eucharist is just sublimated cannibalism, to the unawakened. When the Pope kisses the feet of the laity, he looks like an old toe-queen to some people. The rites of Pan look like a suburban orgy.
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene. It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
I was a supporter and believer in the death penalty, but I've begun to see that this system doesn't work and it isn't functional. It costs an obscene amount of money.
What makes [photography] obscene is its terrible cruelty. Happiness may be fleeting, but it's the reason we go on living. Photography is the joy that precedes pain, the moment of life just before death.
I see the beauty of Mike's attempt to devise an ideal ethic and applaud his recognition that such must start by junking the present sexual code and starting fresh. Most philosophers haven't the courage for this; they swallow the basics of the present code--monogamy, family pattern, continence, body taboos, conventional restrictions on intercourse, and so forth--then fiddle with details...even such piffle as discussing whether the female breast is an obscene sight! (p.365)
Ideas about the scope and meaning of freedom of speech do expand and contract with the times. At the moment, we live in an age that is very permissive, both legally and socially, on a wide range of subjects from Karl Marx to kinky sex. This has not always been the case. Things that even children freely see and read and hear today -- writings, pictures, words -- would have been banned as just plain obscene, even for adults, as recently as the middle of the twentieth century.
My sister's asthmatic. In the middle of an asthma attack she got an obscene phone call. The guy said, "Did I call you or did you call me?"
I always said God was against art and I still believe it. Anything obscene or trivial is blessed in this world and has a reward - I ask for no reward - only to live & to hear my work.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.
To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius.
The Bible: a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise mankind.
...It would be more consistent that we call [the Bible] the work of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.
Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and tortuous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we call it the word of a demon than the word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize humankind.
Do you know we are being led to Slaughters by placid admirals & that fat slow generals are getting Obscene on young blood Do you know we are ruled by t.v.
When you call us, ladies and gentlemen, just so you know, we do have your phone number. And if you say anything untoward, obscene or anything like that, FOX security then will contact your local authorities, and you will be held accountable.
The human body is not obscene, sexuality is not obscene. But it [pornography] is not sex, it is violence. It encourages acceptance of the idea that violence is a legitimate part of sexuality.
Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.