Quotes About Taboos

It never seems to have occured to you that in Nature life is growth, and preservation is an accident. ... What is preserved in the rocks or in ice is only the image of life, but you were always regarding local taboos as eternal verities, and attempting to preserve them.

Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.

A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one's own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos).

I didn't invent satire. I didn't come up with it. And it will continue to be a very powerful tool to disrupt political taboos and social taboos and religious taboos, because those taboos are always used to control and to curb people's way of creativity and thinking, by making them feel guilty because they want to make a change.

The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion of empathy, but it also owes much to harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos, and conceptions of human rights. This

The moral sense sanctifies a set of norms and taboos that govern the interactions among people in a culture, sometimes in ways that decrease violence, though often (when the norms are tribal, authoritarian, or puritanical) in ways that increase it.

What's difficult to do in books for children is to create funny incidents. Funny images, funny language and any kind of taboo-breaking is not difficult.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.

Democracy is grounded upon so childish a complex of fallacies that they must be protected by a rigid system of taboos, else even halfwits would argue it to pieces. Its first concern must be to penalize the free play of ideas.

All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos.

I have a rule about no material being sacred.

This is Nightside," said Deadboy. "We do ten impossible things before breakfast, just fora cheap thrill. Abandon all taboos, ye who enter here.

Well, the New Religion, as Ms. Phillips teaches, is "Secular Humanism," which, although it lacks logically consistent precepts, does contain innumerable sanctions and taboos. Of these latter, the most observed is loud and clear: do not tell the truth.

Another limit on intimate marriage in the nineteenth century was that many people still held the Enlightenment view that love developed slowly out of admiration, respect, and appreciation of someone's good character. Coupled with the taboos on expressions of sexual desire, these values meant that the love one felt for a sweetheart often was not seen as qualitatively different from the feeling one might have for a sister, a friend, or even an idea.

Nuestra cultura codifica las reglas para comer sabiamente en una complicada estructura de tabúes, rituales, recetas, modales y tradiciones culinarias que nos evitan tener que enfrentarnos de nuevo al dilema del omnívoro en cada comida.

Chez les Juifs, on allait même jusqu'à envisager dans certains cas la peine de mort pour celui qui s'unirait charnellement avec une femme ayant ses règles ; pour le zoroastrisme, cela constituait un péché sans rémission. On lit dans le code islamique de Sidi Khebil : « Celui qui pour satisfaire son plaisir touche une femme durant les règles, perd la force et la tranquillité de l'esprit. »

Taboos, though unadmitted, are potent. What is it that people fear? What they don't understand. The civilized man is not a whit different from the savage in this respect. The new always carries with it the sense of violation, of sacrilege. What is dead is sacred; what is new, that is, different, is evil, dangerous, or subversive.

Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn't the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Just because society, and government, and whatever was different 100 years ago, doesn't mean that people didn't have sex, pick their nose, or swear.

Los humanos nos esforzamos por diferenciarnos de las bestial hasta tal punto que mostramos un denodado empeño por evitar aquello que nos recuerda que también somos bestias, animales que orinan, defecan, copulan, sangran, mueren, apestan y se descomponen.

Artists—or, in the local parlance, creatives—should no longer push any envelope, go to the dark side, explore taboos, make inappropriate jokes or offer contrarian opinions. We could, but not if we wanted to feed our families.

To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.

Most of us, it seems, have a strong inclination to accept the peculiarities of our social environment as if they were "natural".... that we live in a charmed circle of unchanging taboos, of laws and customs which are felt to be as inevitable as the rising of the sun.

The revolution opened doors for us and allowed an enormous social mobility. Many walls that blocked communication were demolished, and taboos were cast out. (Interview in A Contemporary Cuba Reader, 2000)