For above all, pornography is ritual. It is an enacted drama that is laden with meaning, which imparts a vision of the world. The ...altar for the ritual is a woman's body. And the ritual which is carried out on this altar is the desecration of flesh. Here, what is sacred within the body is degraded.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Literature is the one place in any society where, within the secrecy of our own heads, we can hear voices talking about everything... in every possible way. The reason for ensuring that that privileged arena is preserved is not that writers want the absolute freedom to say and do whatever they please. It is that we, all of us, readers and writers and citizens and generals and goodmen, need that little, unimportant-looking room. We do not need to call it sacred, but we do need to remember that it is necessary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas--...uncertainty, progress, change--into crimes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Sweet is the day of sacred rest; No mortal cares shall seize my breast;... O may my heart in tune be found Like David's harp of solemn sound.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think a Person who is thus terrifyed [sic] with the Imagination of Ghosts and Spectres much more reasonable, than one who contra...ry to the Reports of all Historians sacred and profane, ancient and modern, and to the Traditions of all Nations, thinks the Appearance of Spirits fabulous and groundless.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When society comes to value one child more truly, we shall have, for every community, a country homestead where that child can go,... who needs special encouragement. It will not be a penal place, nor even a place of reform, but it will be held out, rather, as a dear delight and a reward. But when society values the child enough, and realises what the child means to the State, and what the home means to the child, it will provide even better, for then the child will have, in its own home, all that a home should give.... There will be safety. There will be the chance to be well, to be pure; room to grow and breathe in; the sacred privacy of the home circle--all those things that are the birthright of every child. And there will be, in some way, beauty, to which the soul of the child naturally turns, as does a plant to the light.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A penniless man who has no ties to bind him is master of himself at any rate, but a luckless wretch who is in love no longer belon...gs to himself, and may not take his own life. Love makes us almost sacred in our own eyes; it is the life of another that we revere within us; then and so begins for us the cruelest trouble of all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Contact with men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of repulsion. It's very like being in close proxim...ity to faecal matter, the faecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and when it acquired its historically sacred character.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »