Quotes about obscenity

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

— Edward Gibbon

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.

— Ernest Hemingway

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

— D. H. Lawrence

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

Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.

— Henry Miller

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Bertrand Russell

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

Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

— Elwyn Brooks White

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

— Oscar Wilde