Rose George Quotes

Rules governing defecation, hygiene, and pollution exist in every culture at every period in history. It may in fact be the foundation of civilization: What is toilet training if not the first attempt to turn a child into an acceptable member of society?

Civilization is the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

It's funny, in literature no one ever goes to the lavatory.

Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.

Cleanliness is a good thing, which the society should embrace. But it has nothing to do with Modi, nor can he implement it.

Although we take it for granted, sanitation is a physical measure that has probably done more to increase human life span than any kind of drug or surgery.

Feminism is doomed to failure because it is based on an attempt to repeal and restructure human nature.

Bodily fluids and solids are universally the most disgusting things we as human beings can come upon, but as long as they are inside us, it's part of you.

Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?

You know, Stephen says, in the movies no one ever goes to the bathroom. They shave, they brush their teeth. He goes right at this sort of funny taboo we have about the bathroom, and he turned it into this nightmare, you know, your worst fear of what's in there.

We can't legislate human nature.

We don't have spittoons on street corners any more. It's no longer acceptable to spit on the street.

I grew up in society when lots of things were hidden, and they were not hidden just one way, but it was very complicated.

Everything that has to do with sex is somehow... it's the best thing in the world, and it's still the one thing people don't want you to talk about.

The communism of Karl Marx would probably be actually the best for everybody as a whole. But what he didn't figure into was human nature, and that's what corrupts it.

No tendency is quite so strong in human nature as the desire to lay down rules of conduct for other people.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

I'm very interested in poo. We don't have a very good relationship with poo, and we should have.

It may be a mistake, that man, in a state of nature, is more disposed to cruelty than courtesy.

I've always told my children that Americans will tell you pretty much anything, but that convention dictates that we don't like to talk money or politics.

Men will sooner surrender their rights than their customs.

Some of the [Indian] national [sanitation] habits are beyond description, and yet so ingrained as to defy all human effort [to reform.]

Each and every Dutchman has his own manner of thinking, his own manners and habits, usage and speech.

Man seems to be the only animal whose food soils him, making necessary much washing and shield-like bibs and napkins. Moles living in the earth and eating slimy worms are yet as clean as seals or fishes, whose lives are one perpetual wash.

Human beings are gross.