Obscene Quotes - Page 3

• It is not pornography that is obscene, it is hunger that is obscene.

  Jose Saramago

  Hunger, Pornography

  Interview with Jose Eugenio "Jo" Soares on "Jo Soares Eleven Thirty", 1997.

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• Medication without explanation is obscene.

  Toni Cade Bambara

  Health, Medication, Explanation

  Toni Cade Bambara (1982). “The Sea Birds are Still Alive: Stories”, Vintage

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• Letterwriting is the natural outlet of the "odds." The busy-bodies, the idle, the perverted, the cranks, the feel-it-my-duties ... Also the plain depraved. They all write letters. It's their safe outlet, you see. They can be as interfering, as long-winded, as obscene, as pompous, as one-idea'd, as they like on paper, and no one can kick them for it. So they write. My God, how they write!

  Josephine Tey

  Writing, Odds, Ideas

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• 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.

  Lawrence M. Friedman

  Sex, Children, Writing

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• On a deeper level, if our sons are learning they are obscene, disgusting, and untrustworthy, is this the best preparation for fatherhood? And is it the best preparation for becoming a mother - to feel this way about her son?

  Warren Farrell

  Mother, Son, Preparation

  "Father and Child Reunion". Book by Warren Farrell, 2001.

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• I would never use obscene language in the office. Certainly not. I kept my obscene language for the home, where it belongs.

  Harold Pinter

  Home, Office, Use

  Harold Pinter (2013). “Harold Pinter: Plays 4: Betrayal; Monologue; One for the Road; Mountain Language; Family Voices; A Kind of Alaska; Victoria Station; Precisely; The New World Order; Party Time; Moonlight: Ashes to Ashes; Celebration; Umbrellas; God's District; Apart from That”, p.253, Faber & Faber

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• Tout ce qui est anachronique est obsce'  ne. Everything anachronistic is obscene.

  Roland Barthes

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• 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.

  Georges Bataille

  Blood, Criminals, Red

  Georges Bataille (1985). “Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939”, p.8, Manchester University Press

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• Cravats grow higher, as if they mean to protect the throat. The highest cravats in public life will be worn by Citizen Antoine Saint-Just, of the National Convention and the Committee of Public Safety. In the dark and harrowing days of '94, an obscene feminine inversion will appear: a thin crimson ribbon, worn round a bare white neck.

  Hilary Mantel

  Mean, Dark, White

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• 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.

  Edward Elgar

  Art, Believe, Blessed

  Letter to A. J. Jaeger, October 9, 1900.

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• 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. Pbscene is not the picture of a naked woman who exposes her pubic hair but that of a fully clad general who exposes his medals rewarded in a war of aggression; obscene is not the ritual of the Hippies but the declaration of a high dignitary of the Church that war is necessary for peace.

  Herbert Marcuse

  War, Hippie, Hair

  Herbert Marcuse (1971). “An Essay on Liberation”, p.8, Beacon Press

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• The further you go in writing the more alone you are. Most of your best and oldest friends die. Others move away. You do not see them except rarely, but you write and have much the same contact with them as though you were together at the café in the old days. You exchange comic, sometimes cheerfully obscene and irresponsible letters, and it is almost as good as talking. But you are more alone because that is how you must work and the time to work is shorter all the time and if you waste it you feel you have committed a sin for which there is no forgiveness.

  Ernest Hemingway

  Moving, Writing, Talking

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• We're creating a TV show of Scrooge, starring Jamie Farr, with Buddy Hackett as Scrooge. We're shooting in this Victorian set for weeks, and Hackett is pissed all the time, angry that he's not the center of attention, and finally we get to the scene where we've gotta shoot him at the window, saying, "Go get my boots," or whatever. The set is stocked with Victorian extras and little children in Oliver kind of outfits, and the director says, "All right, Bud - just give it whatever you want." And Hackett goes off on a rant. Unbelievably obscene.

  Bill Murray

  Children, Tv Shows, Creating

  Source: www.esquire.com

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• The fact of the matter is that, since we are determined always to keep our feelings to ourselves, we have never given any thought to the manner in which we should express them. And suddenly there is within us a strange and obscene animal making itself heard, whose tones may inspire as much alarm in the person who receives the involuntary, elliptical and almost irresistible communication of one's defect or vice as would the sudden avowal indirectly and outlandishly proffered by a criminal who can no longer refrain from confessing to a murder of which one had never imagined him to be guilty.

  Marcel Proust

  Communication, Animal, Inspire

  Marcel Proust (2000). “In Search of Lost Time, Volume III: The Guermantes Way”, p.257, Modern Library

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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 total amount of money that Wall Street handed out in bonuses last year was double the total income of ALL full-time minimum wage workers. That's obscene.

  Elizabeth Warren

  Wall, Years, Income

  FaceBook post by Elizabeth Warren from Mar 13, 2015

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• I think there [are] great economies that can be made starting with a round of base closings, ... I want the president to veto these pork-barrel spending bills which have grown to incredible obscene levels. I believe there are a number of weapons systems that have to be eliminated.

  John McCain

  Believe, Thinking, Numbers

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• 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.

  Elton John

  People, Drug, Suffering

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• It's almost obscene when you see people who haven't matured, who haven't changed, who don't have the weight of years on them. So that's interesting to me - to think about playing him into the future, anew.

  David Duchovny

  Thinking, Years, People

  "David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson talk The X-Files revival". Interview with John Nugent, www.empireonline.com. January 13, 2016.

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• Income and wealth inequality have reached obscene levels, the threat of climate change is more frightening than ever, and the billionaire class is now allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to buy the candidate they want. And it is up to us to stand up and fight back. If we stand together, there is no limit to what we can accomplish.

  Bernie Sanders

  Fighting, Class, Together

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• 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?"

  John Mendoza

  Phones, Funny Sister, Guy

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• To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy.

  Robert Green Ingersoll

  Language, Celibacy

  Robert Green Ingersoll (1907). “The works of Robert G. Ingersoll”, p.727, Library of Alexandria

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• The federal government, state governments will not do without that tax revenue from tobacco no matter what. I've always thought it was one of the most contradictory setups that we have, because everything said publicly about the product is intended to besmirch it, impugn it, and do the same thing to the people that use it. And yet here's the government scoring, I mean, you want to talk about obscene profits, the government doesn't do a damn thing but stick its hand in. The government taxes tobacco at every stage. It taxes tobacco when the farmer's thinking about planting it.

  Rush Limbaugh

  Mean, Thinking, People

  Source: www.rushlimbaugh.com

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• I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

  William S. Burroughs

  Book, Lunch, Punishment

  Source: realitystudio.org

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• I remember being in high school in the '90s, and even then somehow hearing about the the Canadian Supreme Court's Butler decision which was meant to keep "obscene" material from entering Canada. The stuff being stopped at the border was almost all lesbian.

  Melissa Gira Grant

  School, Decision, Remember

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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