Lenny Bruce Quotes

The CBFC is only mirroring society.

The idea is not to please the most amount of people. Growing up in Versailles, the idea was to please the least amount of people.

Anyone who sees and paints a sky green and fields blue ought to be sterilized.

Saying the “wrong” thing, a purposefully offensive or demonstrably false thing, has become, for the disaffected, a mark of integrity.

Very rarely does a mainstream film push the envelope. A film that's so-called mainstream and questions certain norms, certain notions of morality, and gets away with it opens doors. It means the common man, the majority of the people, have accepted it.

You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn't that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away?

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

What is it about conformity itself that causes us all to require it of our neighbors and of our artists and then, with consummate fickleness, to forget those who fall into line and eternally celebrate those who do not?

I believe that political correctness can be a form of linguistic fascism . . . The only way to react is to get up in the morning and start the day by saying four or five vastly politically incorrect things before breakfast!

There's been an amazing backlash for the last decade in America: political correctness. In many ways, I think that, while we've been remarkably violent in our media, there's been a real schizophrenia. In private, on the Internet, and on public-affairs shows or talk radio, we're way more explicit than we've ever been. But traditional Hollywood has been much more frightened than it ever was in the '70s about presenting things that could be perceived as politically incorrect.

For the superior morality, of which we hear so much, we too would desire to be thankful: at the same time, it were but blindness to deny that this superior morality is properly rather an inferior criminality, produced not by greater love of Virtue, but by greater perfection of Police; and of that far subtler and stronger Police, called Public Opinion.

Everybody doesn't have to have a daughter who's a goodie-two-shoes.

To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist.

Everyone should occasionally break the law in some small and delightful way. It's good for the hygiene of the brain.

It was also never wanting to be part of any group or movement or anything that was the done thing. I hated organization. When you have a group, you have a leader who is going to put down the rest of the group.

All in all you're just another brick in the wall

I don't think that there's that much difference between a photograph of a fist up someone's ass and a photograph of carnations in a bowl.

I'm sure even in America, where you have, like, free speech people self-censor themself. And it's not - it happens because of different reasons. Because maybe it's politically incorrect, it doesn't have to really to be put in jail.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.

Sometimes faggot is the right word. There's a trend in this country to avoid words: "We can't say that one anymore it's offensive."

We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.

A pair of Blue Noses on the next bench glared their disapproval at Evie’s knee-length dress. Evie decided to give them a real show. She hiked her skirt and, humming jauntily, rolled down her stockings, exposing her legs. It had the desired effect on the Blue Noses, who moved down the platform, clucking about the “disgrace of the young.” She would not miss this place.

I think it's important to break taboos for the same reason it's important to break laws and rules - because either you're a slave to them, or you're taking matters into your hands.

I love to do the things the censors won't pass.

I get slightly irritated by people who say they're natural rebels because it just means that they're going to be against whatever anybody does, which is almost like saying you might as well leave it as it is. I'm naturally quite conformist, really. If I go to a country and they say, "You've got to drive on the right," I'm not going to drive on the left to show that I'm different. I'm able to stick to the law. I'm not a soldier for anything, either. I'm only a singer and I don't think it makes a difference what we sing.