Sex

Sex

• "Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled." - Harlan Ellison

• "Love and sex are the things that give life some value, some zest. Miserable as flesh and blood is, it is still the best you can get." - Unknown

• "Sex is natural, sex is good; not everybody does it, but everybody should." - George Michael, song "I Want Your Sex"

• "Software is like sex; it's better when it's free." - Linus Torvalds

• "Unforgettably horrible is the naked body. It really does not have the slightest charm." - Murasaki Shikibu

• "Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it." - Woody Allen

• "Lord, grant me chastity and continence... but not yet." - St. Augustine

• "Sexuality is lovely, there cannot be too much of it, it is self-limiting if satisfactory, and satisfaction diminishes tension and clears the mind for attention and learning." - Paul Goodman

• "Sex, a great and mysterious motive force in human life, has indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages." - William J. Brennan Jr.

• "Sex and laughter do go very well together, and I wondered -- and still do -- which is the more important." - Hermione Gingold

• "If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had if only they persevere." - P. D. James

• "I wouldn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they've always worked for me." - Hunter S. Thompson

• "Life without sex might be safer but it would be unbearably dull." - H. L. Mencken

• "Sex is like money; only too much is enough." - John Updike

• "Is it not life? Is it not the thing?" - Lord Byron

• "'Sex' is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other." - Marquis De Sade

• "Sex is like money, golf, and beer -- even when it's bad, it's good." - Jimmy Williams

• "Some things are better than sex, and some are worse, but there's nothing exactly like it." - W. C. Fields

• "I don't know whether it's normal or not, but sex has always been something I take seriously. I would put it higher than tennis on my list of constructive things to do." - Art Buchwald

• "It's not true that the more sex that you have, the more it interferes with your work. I find that the more sex you have, the better work you do." - H. G. Wells

• "The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer." - Havelock Ellis

• "Sex is a conversation carried out by other means." - Peter Ustinov

• "Sex is one of the nine reasons for reincarnation . The other eight are unimportant." - Henry Miller

• "The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless." - Dorothy Sayers

• "Sex is a game , a weapon , a toy, a joy, a trance, an enlightenment, a loss, a hope." - Sallie Tisdale

• "The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform." - Dr. Alfred Kinsey

• "Certainly nothing is unnatural that is not physically impossible." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

• "Chastity...the most unnatural of all the sexual perversions." - Aldous Huxley

• "The only abnormality is the incapacity to love." - Anais Nin

• "The pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable." - Lord Chesterfield

• "Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble ." - John Barrymore

• "All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I'd sooner go to my dentist any day." - A female character in Evelyn Waugh 's novel Vile Bodies.

• "Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets." - Andy Warhol

• "No sex is better than bad sex." - Germaine Greer

• "Sex is the last refuge of the miserable." - Quentin Crisp

• "Sex is a slot machine." - John Dos Passos

• "Looking for sex can lead to misfortune, and if you get 'lucky' and find it, it can leave you maimed, infected, or dead. Other than that, it's swell." - Edna Buchanan

• "Love is just a system for getting someone to call you 'darling' after sex." - Julian Barnes

• "Sex without love is merely healthy exercise." - Robert A. Heinlein

• "Sex lashes out against counterfeit emotion, and is ruthless, devastating against false love." - D. H. Lawrence

• "Nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from." - Margaret Atwood

• "Sex stops when you pull up your pants, love never lets you go." - Kingsley Amis

• "Love and sex can go together, and sex and unlove can go together, and love and unsex can go together. But personal love and personal sex is bad." - Andy Warhol

• "The sex relation is not personal relation. It can be irresistibly desired and rapturously consummated between persons who could not endure one another for a day in any other relation." - George Bernard Shaw

• "Sex without love is as hollow and ridiculous as love without sex." - Hunter S. Thompson

• "You mustn't force sex to do the work of love or love to do the work of sex." - Mary McCarthy

• "I need sex for a clear complexion, but I'd rather do it for love." - Joan Crawford

• "Civilized people cannot fully satisfy their sexual instinct without love." - Bertrand Russell

• "The prerequisite for making love is liking someone enormously." - Helen Gurley Brown

• "It is not sex that gives us pleasure, but the lover." - Marge Piercy

• "When things don't work well in the bedroom, they don't work well in the living room, either." - Dr. William H. Masters

• "Getting married for sex is like buying a 747 for the free peanuts." - Jeff Foxworthy

• "Very few lasting relationships are made in bed. Fantasies may begin and end there; true love does not." - Dr. Harold Bessell

• "One should never be sexually involved with anyone one genuinely cares for. A sexual relationship guarantees a loss." - Mary Gordon

• "Sex is hardly ever just about sex." - Shirley MacLane

• "Love is not the dying moan of a distant violin, it's the triumphant twang of a bedspring." - S. J. Perelman

• "Sex with love is the greatest thing in life. But sex without love -- that's not so bad either." - Mae West

• "You may think you're in love when the passions of sex get hold of you, but if you didn't love the man before, you won't love him after. Live him, maybe--but not love him." - Mae West

• "An orgasm a day keeps the doctor away." - Mae West

• "It's not the men in my life, but the life in my men." - Mae West

• "When women go wrong, men go right after them." - Mae West

• "I feel like a million tonight. But one at a time." - Mae West

• "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better." - Mae West

• "Sex is an emotion in motion." - Mae West

• "I've been in more laps than a napkin." - Mae West

• "I generally avoid temptation unless I can't resist it." - Mae West

• "I do all my best work in bed." - Mae West

• "I consider sex a misdemeanor; the more I miss, de meaner I get." - Mae West

• "Our sexual self is a complex combination of our social, cultural, and biological inheritance." - Pepper Schwartz

• "'Natural' is a very dangerous word to use about sexuality .... Our society's notions of normality are completely fake and meta-trendy, since they rely on the changing standards of superstition, religion, Christianity and gender bias to define themselves. Americans, in particular, exhibit very childish reactions to sexual practices that are new to them, much like little kids who are offered a vegetable they haven't seen before: 'That's disgusting!' 'But darling, you haven't even tried it!' 'I don't care, I hate it, I hate it!'" - Susie Bright and Jill Posner, eds., Nothing But the Girl

• "The safeword is the word you use in S/M sex that means 'stop;'... it's something innocuous, like 'red,' 'blue,' 'tree,' 'table,' whatever, so I said to my friend Bucky, who was teaching me about safewords, 'But Bucky, what happens if you forget the safeword? Red, blue, green, yellow, onomatopoeia, front-loading dishwasher, what?!' She said, 'Maggie, you say "I forgot the safeword," you idiot!'" - Maggie Cassella

• "It's just that it's been my experience in having sex with some straight men that the sex is over when he gets off. And I don't accept that. I want to have an orgasm. ...Not right now! This is the Isaac Stern Auditorium!... No. I want to have one. I will put a chalk board over the bed. One... one." - Margaret Cho

• "I'm very inappropriate, which makes me a problem dinner guest, because at some point during the evening someone inevitably says, 'Okay, heh heh heh, okay, too much information! Heh heh heh. Don't go there!' I live there. I bought a house there. I'm gonna take you there!" - Margaret Cho, Revolution

• "We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition." - Alexander Comfort

• "In America sex is an obsession; in other parts of the world it is a fact." - Marlene Dietrich

• "So we are proud to reclaim the word 'slut' as a term of approval, even endearment. To us, a slut is a person of any gender who has the courage to lead life according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "A slut shares his sexuality the way a philanthropist shares her money — because they have a lot to share, because it makes them happy to share it, because sharing makes the world a better place." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "Joe was very possessive. I was perfectly faithful. He would beat me, screaming imprecations, 'You slut!' when another man looked at me. After I left, I decided he was right — I am a slut, I want to be a slut, I will never promise monogamy again. After all, why would any care who I fucked? I will never be a piece of property again, no matter how valuable that property is considered. Joe made a feminist of me. A feminist slut. - Dossie Easton, in The Ethical Slut with Catherine Liszt

• "We see ourselves surrounded by the 'walking wounded' — by people who have been deeply, if not irrevocably, injured by fear, shame, and hatred of their own sexual selves. We believe that happy connected sex is the cure for these wounds, that it is important, possibly even essential, to most people's sense of self-worth, to their belief that life is good. We have never met anyone who had low self-esteem at the moment of orgasm." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "If you walk up to a randomly selected individual and propose that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you, you will probably hear a lot of spluttering, argument, and 'yahbuts' — AIDS, unwanted pregnancies, rape, the Madison Avenue commercialization of sexual desire, and so on. None of which changes the core idea. There is nothing in this world so terrific that it can't be abused if you're determined to do so: familial connections can be violated, sexual desire can be manipulated. Even chocolate can be abused. That doesn't change the wonderfulness of any of these things: the danger lies in the motivation of the abuser, not the nature of the item." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "Even people who consider themselves sex-positive and sexually liberated often fall into a different trap — the trap of rationalizing sex. Releasing physical tension, relieving menstrual symptoms, maintaining mental health, preventing prostate problems, making babies, cementing relationships and so on are all admirable goals, and wonderful side results of sex. But they are not what sex is for. Sex is for pleasure, a complete and worthwhile goal in and of itself. People have sex because it feels very good, and then they feel good about themselves. The worthiness of pleasure is one of the core values of ethical sluthood." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "We've ... been called 'indiscriminate' in our sexuality, which we resent: we can always tell our lovers apart." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "We measure the ethics of a good slut not by the number of his partners, but by the respect and care with which he treats them." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "To believe that God doesn't like sex is like believing that God doesn't like you: we all wind up carrying a secret shame for our own perfectly natural sexual desires and fulfillments. We prefer the beliefs of a woman we met who is a devoted churchgoer. She told us that when she was about five years old, she discovered the joys of masturbation in the back seat of the family car, tucked under a warm blanket on a long trip. It felt so wonderful that she concluded that the existence of her clitoris was proof positive that God loved her." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "A subset of [the myth that only monogamous relationships are real ones] is the belief that if you're really in love, you will automatically lose all interest in others, and thus, if you're having sexual or romantic feelings towards anyone but your partner, you're not really in love. This myth has cost many people a great deal of happiness through the centuries, yet is untrue to the point of absurdity; a ring around the finger does not cause a nerve block to the genitals." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "Myth #3: Loving someone makes it OK to control his behavior. This kind of territorial reasoning is designed, we guess, to make people feel secure – but we don't believe that anyone has the right, much less the obligation, to control the behavior of another functioning adult. Being treated according to this myth doesn't make us feel secure, it makes us feel furious." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "'Easy:' Is there, we wonder, some value in being difficult?" - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "[Wilhelm] Reich theorized that without the suppression of sexuality and the imposition of anti-sexual morality, you could not have an authoritarian government, because people would be free from shame, and would trust their own sense of right and wrong. Such people are unlikely to march to war against their wishes, and we would like to think they would be unlikely to agree to operate the death camps too." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "We have been taught by our culture that when our partner has sex with another, we have lost something. Not to sound dumb, but we are confused. What have we lost?" - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "Some people consider any form of sex education to be child abuse, and many do not feel that children should have any information at all about adult sexual activities. ...How are we to teach our children to say 'no' to an abusive adult if we are not frank about what it is that they should say no to?" - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "When both genders feel free to answer 'yes' or 'no' with no concern for anything but their own desires, a truer understanding, and a more positive sexuality, can be achieved. Dossie tells the story of a woman friend of hers back in the '70s who, as an experiment, sat patiently in a singles' bar one night, being approached by many men, until finally one to whom she felt attracted came along and began to flirt. She asked him nicely if he would like to come back to her place and fuck. He swallowed his ice. It took the poor fellow a couple of minutes before he could talk coherently again, and when they actually got to her place he found himself impotent. That's how deeply ingrained some of these cultural stereotypes can be." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "It is amazing to us to think ... that most people in our culture have never had a chance to watch another person enjoy sex. No wonder we worry so much about our appearance. You will feel much better about how you look, how you perform, and who you are, when you have a chance to see real people having real sex. Look around you — every single person is gorgeous when they come." - Dossie Easton and Catherine Liszt, The Ethical Slut

• "Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean. And when the unclean shall be no more, what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling of the mind?" - Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

• "It is significant that whenever the public mind is to be diverted from great social wrong, a crusade is inaugurated against indecency." - Emma Goldman

• "Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity." - Remy de Gourmont

• "Men ought to be more conscious of their bodies as an object of delight." - Germaine Greer

• "When authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with the authorities." - Matt Groening, Life in Hell

• "Give pleasure. Accept pleasure. It's that easy." - Kenneth Hanes, "The Gay Guy's Guide to Life"

• "Chastity always takes its toll. In some it produces pimples; in others, sex laws." - Karl Kraus

• "Much more genius is needed to make love than to command armies." - Ninon de Lenclos

• "A promiscuous person is someone who is getting more sex than you are." - Victor Lownes

• "Take off all your clothes and walk down the street waving a machete and firing an Uzi, and terrified citizens will phone the police and report: 'There's a naked person outside!'" - Mike Nichols

• "The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life." - Bertrand Russell

• "Happy family: The existence and maintenance of [this] is thought to make a politician fit for public office. According to this theory, the public are less concerned by whether or not they are effectively represented than by the need to be assured that the penises and vaginas of public officials are only used in legally sanctioned circumstances." - John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion

• "Moral crusade: Public activity undertaken by middle-aged men who are cheating on their wives or diddling little boys. Moral crusades are particularly popular among those seeking power for their own personal pleasure, politicians who can't think of anything useful to do with their mandates, and religious professionals suffering from a personal inability to communicate with their god." - John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion

• "Venereal: From Venus, the goddess of love, this word refers to the reality of desire. With the rise of Protestantism and science, the word 'disease' was tacked on in a revealing combination of categorization and moralizing. 'Which disease?' 'The disease of love.' " - John Ralston Saul, The Doubter's Companion

• "Fifty percent of the women in this country are not having orgasms. If that were true of the male population, it would be declared a national emergency." - Margo St. James

• "If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long." - Gloria Steinem

• "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." - Pierre Trudeau

• "It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue." - Voltaire

• "You have to be brave in this culture to say, 'This turns me on.'" - Rufus Wainwright

• "She can only be so annoying when she's face down in a mattress." - Overheard in a Bar

Verse

Sex and drugs and rock and roll

Is all my brain and body need.

Sex and drugs and rock and roll

Is very good indeed.

- Ian Dury

Sex contains all, bodies, souls

Meanings, proofs, purities, delicacies, results,

promulgations,

Songs, commands, health, pride, the maternal

mysetery, the seminal milk,

All hopes, benefactions, bestowals, all the

passions, loves, beauties,

delights of the earth.

- Walt Whitman

The path of true love isn't smooth,

the ruffled feathers sex can soothe,

soon ruffle again--for couples never

spend all their lives in bed together.

- Gavin Ewart

Sex is good

sex is funny

many people fuck for money

and if you think that sex is funny

fuck yourself

and save your money

- Anonymous

Sources

• Marianne Hunter (ed.), Sex: A Book of Quotations, Barnes & Noble Books, 2003. ISBN 0-7607-4072-0