Obscenity Laws Quotes

We live in a world where in the movie you can disembowel someone in a youth hostel in Romania, but you can't show people having sex. I think it's weird.

To me it's a mystery that you can show the horrific things in the movies, but not some sexual stuff which everyone does.

In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that individual communities should set obscenity standards. Whenever a case is tried, it will be based on a community standard for that particular place.

Federal money should not be used to give kids access to dirty peep shows.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.

I've always found it very difficult to understand the laws as far as nudity in America - how some things are pornographic and some things are not pornographic. It's against the law to go topless on the beach, but you can go buy a gun. That just seems so absurd to me.

A librarian is not a legal process. There is not librarian in the country — unless she or he is a lawyer — who is in the position to determine what he or she is looking at is indeed child pornography.

It never hurt Lenny Bruce's career to get arrested for swearing. It did back in the time, but he broke those doors down by doing the stuff that he believed in.

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

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

The history of the application of laws designed to suppress the obscene demonstrates convincingly that the power of government can be invoked under them against great art or literature, scientific treatises, or works exciting social controversy. Mistakes of the past prove that there is a strong countervailing interest to be considered in the freedoms guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments.

For example, I'm a great fan of pornography, but I don't see any reason not to restrict it so that people walking down the street who hate pornography don't have full color pictures outside of movie theaters. Let them be in a different district. I'm kidding about pornography, but you get the point.

Liberal censors are the worst. I don't remember any trouble with 'Serial Mom' or 'Cecil B. Demented' or any of them. Except 'Cry Baby.'

I want you to see me naked and performing one or two dozen mad acts, which will take me less than half an hour, because if you have seen them with your own eyes, you can safely swear to any others you might wish to add.

They still had the Lord Chamberlain, so we had this idiotic censorship. We were allowed three Jesus Christs instead of 10. Why three were OK, I don't know.

The nowadays ruling that no word is unprintable has, I think, done nothing whatever for beautiful letters. ... Obscenity is too valuable a commodity to chuck around all over the place; it should be taken out of the safe on special occasions only.

Twenty-some states in the United States have statutes that say showing the nipples to children is oscene. That's the first thing we come into contact with when we arrive on this palnet: a woman's breasts!

To vest a few fallible men — prosecutors, judges, jurors — with vast powers of literary or artistic censorship, to convert them into what J. S. Mill called a "moral police," is to make them despotic arbiters of literary products. If one day they ban mediocre books as obscene, another day they may do likewise to a work of genius.

We're living in a world where [Judy Blume] books were ever banned, and now like "Fifty Shades of Grey" is being read in high schools. Like it's just a wild.

Only ugliness is obscene.

I'll defend child pornography, how about that? What's wrong with seeing some child pornography? What if you watch child pornography because you find it hilarious? Then should it not a protected freedom of speech?

Commercial speech is like obscenity... we can't seem to define it, but we know it when we see it.

There are obviously legal restrictions on what you can do on TV in the States, as there are everywhere.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous.