Quotes

"If one behaves like the people across the street, one is the people across the street. Instead of changing the world, one merely becomes the reflection of what one would like to destroy."

-- Emmanuelle Arsan (quoting Jean Genet?)

"When it comes to mammals, monogamy has long been known as a rarity. Out of 4,000 mammal species, no more than a few dozen form reliable pair-bonds, although in many cases it is hard to characterize them with certainty because the social and sexual lives of mammals tend to be more furtive then those of birds. Monogamous mammals are most likely to be bats (a few species only), certain canids (especially foxes), a few primates (notably the tiny New World monkeys known as marmosets and tamarins), a handful of mice and rats, several odd-sounding South American rodents (agoutis, pacas, acouchis, maras), the giant otter of South America, the northern beaver, a handful of species of seals, and a couple of small African antelopes (duikers, dik-diks, and klipspringers). A pitiful list."

-- David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton

"If we define sexual abnormality as something we should cure, merely because it occurs less frequently than what we think of as normal sexuality, are we also going to wipe out other rare or 'aberrant' behaviours like the ability to compose music, mathematical genius, or great artistic ability to wield a paintbrush or a sculptor's chisel?"

-- Patrick Califia

"How glorious it would be to treat ourselves to six, seven men in a row, to have a constellation of semens twirling about in each of us, but we women have not been allowed that for the past ten thousand years or so."

-- Francine Du Plessis

"Many people also believe that unashamed sexual desire, particularly desire for many people, destroys the family - yet we suspect that far more families have been destroyed by bitter divorces over adultery than have ever been disturbed by ethical consensual nonmonogamy."

-- Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt

"[W]e are proud to reclaim the word 'slut' as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you. A slut may have choose to have sex with herself only, or with the Fifth Fleet. He may be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual, a radical activist or a peaceful suburbanite."

-- Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt

"Pornography is supposed to arouse sexual desires. If pornography is a crime, when will they arrest makers of perfume?"

-- Richard Fleischer

"Anger and intolerance are the enemies of correct understanding."

-- Gandhi

"Human kind has to get out of violence only through nonviolence. Hatred can be overcome only by love. Counter-hatred only increases the surface as well as the depth of hatred."

-- Gandhi

"Go to your fields and your gardens, and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of the bee to gather honey of the flower, But it is also the pleasure of the flower to yield its honey to the bee. For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life, And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love, And to both, bee and flower, the giving and the receiving of pleasure, is a need and an ecstasy."

-- Kahlil Gibran

"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love."

-- Butch Hancock

"Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking."

-- Derek Jarman

"The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting."

-- Gloria Leonard

"To Love is Human, to Orgasm, Divine."

-- Linnea-, #polyamory

"In sex it is the attitude of experiencing sexual desire and passion as one aspect of interpersonal relationships. Separating sex from the rest of self, indeed, is no more tenable than to isolate one's larynx and speak of "my vocal cords wanting to talk with my friends."

-- Rollo May

"Making love we are all more alike than we are when we are talking or acting. In the climax of the sexual act, moreover, we forget ourselves. That is commonly felt to be one of its recommendations. Sex annihilates identity."

-- Mary McCarthy

"Nymphomaniac: a woman as obsessed with sex as an average man."

-- Mignon McLaughlin

"I am amused that someone thinks a glimpse of my nipples could corrupt the youth of America. When one in every five people in America is either burgled or mugged, I wonder whether a glimpse of nipple now and then might help?"

-- Sarah Miles

"To choose nonmonogamy is to decline a particular protection, and involves some risks. It demands the self-awareness to know what you want, the strength to ask for it, the sensitivity to hear a refusal, and the power to refuse what you don't want and have that refusal be respected. Maintaining successful nonmonogamous relationships requires these abilities. Oddly enough, many view nonmonogamy as an inability rather than an ability."

-- Annie S. Murray

"Sex touches the heavens only when it simultaneously touches the gutter and the mud."

-- George Jean Nathan

"I want this society to be a place where I and others are turned on, liberated, and empowered by our pride in our erotic selves. More good pornography can do that."

-- Mark Pritchard

"To guide another person to orgasm, to hold and caress, to provide companionship and initiation to new forms of sex, to embody the Divine and embrace the seeker - these are healing and holy acts."

-- Carol Queen

"I consider a day in which I make love only once virtually wasted."

-- Porfirio Rubirosa

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

-- George Bernard Shaw

"Love withers under constraint: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear: it is there most pure, perfect, and unlimited, where its votaries live in confidence, equality, and unreserve."

-- Percy Bysshe Shelley

"To affirm pleasure is to affirm life in its deepest purposes, to value the intimate connections we make, the moments of ecstacy we experience. When we claim our sacred right to pleasure, we are honoring life in its variety, diversity, its endless arrangements and rearrangements. We are acknowledging our participation in the deepest erotic purposes of the universe."

-- Starhawk

"We are part of an erotic being in an erotic universe, whose deepest purposes seem to be served by getting various creatures to rub against each other in a wide variety of ways. Erotic energy holds the universe together. What is gravity but the desire of one body for another?"

-- Starhawk

"If the target of the feminist campaign is violence against women, the question must be asked whether pornography is really the best place to try to make some headway against violence. Mainstream movies and TV are notorious for their violent imagery, and the claim that sexuality is the prime locus for violence against women ignores these genres entirely. As feminists we might ask why sexuality and pornography need to be included at all. If what we are interested in eliminating is the subordination of women, why does it have to be sexually explicit material that we target? Servility, injury, enjoying pain - why do they get banned only if they involve sex? The honest political answer is that no one is about to ban violent images in this country [i.e. the US] - they are too mainstream. Only sexual images are sufficiently offensive to large diverse groups, and targeting seemingly violent sexual images would be the only way for feminists to get widespread public support. But the consequence of picking on sexual images is that sexuality itself becomes the target. This result is a major setback for those groups within the women's movement whose goal is to de-repress women's sexuality."

-- Leonore Tiefer

"We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation."

-- Lily Tomlin

"Each time one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible."

-- Oscar Wilde

"Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. 'Yes' is the answer."

-- Swami X

"Good sex is like a light and sound show: Leave the lights on and let out some sound."

-- Shirley Zussman