Douglas E. Applegate Quotes

We seem okay with violence, but nudity we race to criticize and censor.

Apropos of the agitation for abolishing the Censor in England, it occurred to me that not even the advocates of freedom seek to justify the free treatment of sexual matters in any other than a high moral-pointing vein. The notion that sexual themes might allowably be treated in the mere aim of amusement does not seem to have occurred to anybody at all.

So long as men are corrupt and revel in sewer filth, entertainers will sell them what they want. Laws may be passed, arrests may be made, lawyers may argue, courts may sentence and jails may harbor men of corrupt minds, but pornography and allied insults to decency will never cease until men have cleansed their minds and cease to require and pay for such vile stuff.

Young girls have been infected by television programs and have become sex addicts…. Young women should not laugh in public.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

You could be as vulgar as you want, as long as three tiny spots were covered.

It's true that obscenity is a matter of taste and in the eye of the beholder.

I love my country, but I believe that we are too quick to censor nudity.

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

There is a fine line between censorship and good taste and moral responsibility.

Morals are private. Decency is public.

My desire to curtail undue freedom of speech extends only to such public areas as restaurants, airports, streets, hotel lobbies, parks, and department stores. Verbal exchanges between consenting adults in private are as of little interest to me as they probably are to them.

Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

One of the damnable unhappy conditions of life is sometimes Government has to make people be civil.

The way to preserve the flag's special role is not to punish those who feel differently about these matters. It is to persuade them that they are wrong.... Our decision is a reaffirmation of the principles of freedom and inclusiveness that the flag best reflects, and of the conviction that our toleration of such criticism [flag-burning] is a sign and source of our strength.

We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so we dilute the freedom that this cherished emblem represents.

I do not want to see censorship, yet I don't believe a dime of taxpayer money should go into art that is clearly and visibly filth.

However offensive that book may be, inciting murder and offering rewards for its perpetration are deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior.

The American way is to let each family decide what they want in their homes, not somebody in Washington …. Four letter words are acceptable to some families and not acceptable to others.

Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters—because girls can read as well as boys—reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?

Would you want your wife or your servant to read this book?

We don't call art filth or filth art.

It is an unmistakable statement of contempt for a government to burn its flag.

The community standards in New York are so low that nothing is obscene.