Quotes About Prudes

America was, alas, a country of great eccentrics and great prudes, of great writers and few readers.

In the bath the attitude toward sex is representative. No people have it more firmly in place. They are a bit puritanical sometimes, and a number of prudes exist, but there is no people less prurient. What they are prurient about is money. Some Japanese treat money as we treat sex. But, as for sex—well, there are no young bloods trying to peak over the partition.

He does not, if you please, consider me a fit and proper person to have charge of Lucilla, and doesn't scruple to say so! I'm told it is always so with loose- screws: they become downright prudes where the females of their own families are concerned! I imagine that must be because they know too much about the wiles of seducers– from their own experiences!

Paint a self-portrait, for our parlor. I want to see that one eyebrow permanently arched, permanently skeptical—the look of someone who doesn't suffer prudes easily.

There must be room in our world for eccentricity, even if it offends the prudes, and room for the vague other-worldliness that often goes with genius.

We've been brought up to think of the Victorians as prudes, horrified by a glimpse of table leg, but that myth was constructed in the 1920s out of whole cloth, to give their rebellious children an excuse to point and say, We invented sex! The reality is stranger: the Victorians were licentious in the extreme behind closed doors, only denying everything in public in the pursuit of probity.

There are no more thorough prudes than those who have some little secret to hide.

Experience isn't any use. And yet, in quite another way, it might be. If only we weren't all such miserable fools and prudes and cowards.