Moral Panic Quotes

The current dominant opinion supporting the war on drugs in general, and our anti-marijuana laws in particular, is reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student. While alcoholic beverages are now regarded as ordinary articles of commerce, their use was then condemned with the same moral fervor that now supports the war on drugs.

Prohibition is an awful flop. We like it. It can't stop what it's meant to stop. We like it. It's left a trail of graft and slime, It don't prohibit worth a dime, It's filled our land with vice and crime. Nevertheless, we're for it.

Perhaps more than any other disease before or since, syphilis in early modern Europe provoked the kind of widespread moral panic that AIDS revived when it struck America in the 1980s.

When I first heard 'Pearly Gates' by Mobb Deep and 50 Cent growing up, the rapper Prodigy had a line about wanting to beat Jesus up. I wasn't religious, but I'd never been introduced to something like that. I was scared and mad, but then I asked why I felt like that.

Witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality awakened by the superstud Devil.

You know what's funny is, when I made 'Saw,' I got accused of being a fascist; when I made 'Insidious,' I got accused of being godless, and now I made the 'Conjuring' films, and I'm accused of being too much God.

Rock n' roll was a bad and evil thing. l remember once I was singing a Barry Manilow song, "Mandy," In the back seat of the car. It came on the radio, and I kind of sang with it, and I got smacked In the mouth because that song was "evil."

What's funny is, when I made 'Saw,' I got accused of being a fascist, when I made 'Insidious,' I got accused of being godless, and now I made the 'Conjuring' films, and I'm accused of being too much God.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

Every new medium has, within a short time of its introduction, been condemned as a threat to young people. Pulp novels would destroy their morals, TV would wreck their eyesight, video games would make them violent.

Societies need to have one illness which becomes identified with evil, and attaches blame to its victims.

I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat.

I think the church and the religion right now have a lot more to be worried about than SLAYER.

We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality.

I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.

I've made plenty of violent games in my life. I play violent games. They don't affect people in the way that a lot of people think they do. They just don't. It's demonstrably true that they don't, and anybody who thinks they do is just not thinking.

It's not that the film is violent, it's that people have an issue with violence right now.

The teenager seems to have replaced the Communist as the appropriate target for public controversy and foreboding.

We can replace the Negro mania with an anti-Mormon crusade.

People forget at the time that 'The Simpsons' started out, it was controversial - the fact that they said 'hell' and 'damn' in a cartoon was a lot. America was in an uproar.

Prohibition was a pseudo-reform, a pinched, parochial substitute for reform,, not merely an aversion to drunkenness and to the evils that accompanied it, but to the immigrant drinking masses, to the pleasures and amenities of city life, and to the well-to-do classes and cultivated men.

It's like tabloid news programs that talk about how horrible something is, while at the same time they're glorifying it as their top story.

I was roundly criticized for being in and around rock & roll music at its inception. It was the devil's music: it would make your teeth fall out and your hair turn blue, whatever the hell. You get through that.

It's a bit like the search for witches. You can always find them.

The witch-hunt was a perverse manifestation of the panic which set in among all classes when the balance began to turn toward greater individual freedom. The witch-hunt was not, however, a mere repression. It was also, and as importantly, a long overdue opportunity for everyone so inclined to express publicly his guilt and sins, under the cover of accusations against the victims.