Quotes About Prudishness

I don't even like watching sex scenes in movies. I have a slight prudish side to me.

For the French, talent excuses much, genius excuses all, and prudishness is inexcusable.

Scott himself had taught me that in the boundless sphere of the intellect there is no prudishness, no shockability. There is only evaluation of facts, and a morality founded on truth.

To the puritan all things are impure

The Bible teaches us that lovemaking is to be honoured among Christians; to honour something means to esteem it highly. Those Christians who have reacted to public immorality by retreating into blue-nosed prudishness in their own bedrooms are very much part of the problem

Scott himself had taught me that in the boundless sphere of the intellect there is no prudishness, no shockability. There is only evaluation of facts, and a morality founded on truth.

I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.

I never quite got the hang of the getting drunk & fondling the thighs [of all the cumbersome young males] business... whether that makes me a gallant & proper gentleman, a cowardly wuss or an unadventurous prude, I cannot make out

Ruskin never escaped his prudish ways or gave any indication of desiring to. After the death of J. M. W. Turner, in 1851, Ruskin was given the job of going through the works left to the nation by the great artist and found several watercolors of a cheerfully erotic nature. Horrified, Ruskin decided that they could only have been drawn "under a certain condition of insanity," and for the good of the nation destroyed almost all of them, robbing posterity of several priceless works.

I want you to be my mistress." Of course she had known what was coming; yet, when it came, some radical prudishness within her was offended by the word. She stifled its promptings vigorously. They were unworthy of her — unworthy of her fine, free, emancipated, passionate modernity. What would become of their frank and glorious equality, their high-flown theories, if she refused him? And yet...

I have always regarded "atheism" in the true sense (that is, anti-theism, not simply anti-clericalism) as a moral and/or epistemic failure--perhaps a prudishness if not absence of the imagination, which when threatened can morph into bigotry toward that which one simply fails to understand. The neologism "theophobia" would not be out of place.

As Victorian-era prudishness set in, some upstanding citizens also took to putting coverlets over the instrument's legs out of an exaggerated sense of modesty.

Warner records that the one female biological function permitted the Virgin in Christian faith was the act of nursing, yet by the sixteenth century contemporary prudishness and the upper-class custom of employing a wet nurse led to the virtual disappearance from art of the suckling Madonna

I do possess a certain rigidity, a certain prudishness. I hate it in myself.

There are no greater prudes than those women who have some secret to hide.

In the United States of America, we are so liberal-minded on so many different aspects, but for some reason there's always going to be this weird connection with nudity being a bad thing. Americans can be so prude sometimes.

With her love of finery, her unmade beds, her litters of unfinished scrapbooks, her taboos, superstitions, and prudishness, her remarkable dignity, her pity for the persecuted, her awe of the gentry, and her detailed knowledge of the family trees of all the Royal Houses of Europe, she was a disorganized mass of unreconciled denials, a servant girl born to silk. Yet in spite of all this, she fed our oafish wits with steady, imperceptible shocks of beauty. Though

For young Brits like Xan and Paddy, brute force was everything they were trying to escape. Biê was boarding school beatings, Victorian prudishness, the blind obedience to the dogma of "Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die" that sent their fathers and brothers marching into machine-gun fire during the Great War. Weirdly, religion had a lot to

At that moment, noticing that his embroidered handkerchief was revealing part of its coloured edging, he thrust it back into his pocket with a startled glance, like a prudish but not innocent woman concealing bodily charms which in her excessive modesty she sees as wanton.