Obscenity Quotes - Page 3

• 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

  Class, Ideas, Atheism

  Walter Lippmann (2003). “Men of Destiny (Ppr)”, p.98, Transaction Publishers

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• ... 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

  Dust, Middle, Curse

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• 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

  Pain, Fighting, Thinking

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

  Desmond Tutu

  Thinking, Death Penalty, Penalties

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

  John Donne

  Levels, Bling, Ugly

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• War over water would be an ultimate obscenity. And yet, unfortunately it is conceivable... Water has been a source over so many years of erosion of confidence, of tension, of human rights abuses, really, of so many in areas whose traditional water supplies have been controlled and depleted by occupational authorities. That must stop if we're going to be able to develop a climate for peace.

  Queen Noor of Jordan

  War, Rights, Erosion

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• 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

  Fear, Heart, Eye

  John Howard Griffin (2006). “Black Like Me: The Definitive Griffin Estate Edition”, p.49, Wings Press

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• 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 José

  Girl, Country, Real

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• People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.

  David Mitchell

  People, Becoming, Function

  David Mitchell (2008). “Cloud Atlas: A Novel”, p.470, Random House

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• 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

  Eye, Justice, Doe

  Tony Kushner (1994). “A Bright Room Called Day”, p.128, Theatre Communications Group

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• It's a mistake, you know. You have no idea what you'll be exposed to...the obscenities and lewd comments, the lecherous gazes, the groping and pinching...and that's just my house. Imagine what it would be like here.

  Lisa Kleypas

  Mistake, Ideas, House

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• The concept of 'obscenity' is tested when one dares to look at something that he has an unbearable desire to see but has forbidden himself to look at. When one feels that everything that one had wanted to see has been revealed, 'obscenity' disappears, the taboo disappears as well, and there is a certain liberation.

  Nagisa Oshima

  Desire, Looks, Unbearable

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• 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

  Book, Reading, Mind

  Theodore Schroeder (1911). “"Obscene" Literature and Constitutional Law: A Forensic Defense of Freedom of the Press”

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• In Spain in the meantime, Aristotelian scholar Juan Gines de Sepulveda was putting the impolitic moralizing of Las Casas into proper perspective for posterity: "Compare then the blessings enjoyed by Spaniards of prudence, genius, magnanimity, temperance, humanity, and religion with those of the little men [the Indians] in whom you will scarcely find even vestiges of humanity. . . . How can we doubt that these people - so uncivilized, so barbaric, contaminated with so many impieties and obscenities - have been justly conquered?"

  Juan Gines de Sepulveda

  Blessing, Men, People

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

  Brendan Gill

  Art, Notable, Graves

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• The definition of obscenity on the newsstands should be extended to many hunting magazines.

  Wayne Pacelle

  Hunting, Magazines, Definitions

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

  Elihu Palmer

  Common Sense, Religion, Obscurity

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• Obscenities are too often used for shock value, as a kind of shorthand for real expression of emotion. You've got to scale down your monstrosities. A scream is not a discovery.

  John L'Heureux

  Real, Discovery, Expression

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• The writer has a grudge against society, which he documents with accounts of unsatisfying sex, unrealized ambition, unmitigated loneliness, and a sense of local and global distress. The square, overpopulation, the bourgeois, the bomb and the cocktail party are variously identified as sources of the grudge. There follows a little obscenity here, a dash of philosophy there, considerable whining overall, and a modern satirical novel is born.

  Renata Adler

  Sex, Philosophy, Loneliness

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• I was a kid and it was kind of scabrous, and it wasn't the sacrilege that bothered me so much as the obscenity that challenged a 14-year-old American. But over the years, I came to have a keen appreciation of Charlie Hebdo and what it did.

  Scott Simon

  Appreciation, Kids, Charlie Hebdo

  Source: www.npr.org

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• Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

  Susie Bright

  Baby, Real, Law

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• 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

  Teeth, World, Matter

  H. P. Blavatsky (1994). “Isis Unveiled: (Two Volumes in a Slipcase)”, p.583, Quest Books

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• 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

  Children, Lessons, Midst

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• When you can use dirty words in every situation with everyone, that's a real big liberation.

  Lina Wertmuller

  Freedom, Real, Dirty

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

  Willie Aames

  Doors, Rottweilers, Reason

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