The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveal...s that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old guard may grumble and occasionally sue, but in a society where Portnoy's Complaint is a record-breaking best- seller sexua...l permissiveness is no longer an issue. The real resistance now is to an art which forces its audience to recognize and accept imaginatively, in their nerve-ends, not the facts of life but the facts of death and violence: absurd, random, gratuitous, unjustified, and inescapably part of the society we have created.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Religion is by no means a proper subject of conversation in mixed company; it should only be treated among a very few people of le...arning, for mutual instruction. It is too awful and respectable a subject to become a familiar one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If you believe in your own sex, and won't have it done dirt to: they'll down you. It's the one insane taboo left: sex as a natural... and vital thing.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.... Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of d...iseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to defile the imagination and to introduce into our judgments of our fell...ow-men a secret element of gusto.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »