Hugh Hefner Quotes

Life is too short to be living somebody else's dream.

Living in the moment, thinking about the future, and staying connected to the past: That's what makes me feel whole.

If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

The notion that Playboy turns women into sex objects is ridiculous. Women are sex objects. If women weren't sex objects, there wouldn't be another generation. It's the attraction between the sexes that makes the world go 'round. That's why women wear lipstick and short skirts.

If you don't encourage healthy sexual expression in public, you get unhealthy sexual expression in private. If you attempt to suppress sex in books, magazines, movies and even everyday conversation, you aren't helping to make sex more private, just more hidden. You're keeping sex in the dark. What we've tried to do is turn on the lights.

In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined a sweeter life.

My best pick-up line is "My name is Hugh Hefner."

I'm never going to grow up. Staying young is what it is all about for me.

Sex is the driving force on the planet. We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy.

Several girlfriends are easier to handle than one wife.

It's perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It's something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to the humankind and nature on this planet and in the universe. I am in overwhelming awe of it all: It is so fantastic, so complex, so beyond comprehension. What does it all mean -- if it has any meaning at all? But how can it all exist if it doesn't have some kind of meaning? I think anyone who suggests that they have the answer is motivated by the need to invent answers, because we have no such answers.

I don't have dinner parties - I eat my dinner in bed.

Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.

I would like to think that I will be remembered as someone who had some positive impact on the sociosexual values of his time. And I think I'm secure and happy in that.

Playboy was founded on the notion that nice girls like sex too.

It's good to be selfish. But not so self-centered that you never listen to other people.

The interesting thing is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people.

My life is an open book. With illustrations.

Life is bittersweet. Inside our heads, if we're lucky, we're the same kids as we were when we were young.

We indeed did and do own our own minds and bodies, and anything from church or state that limits that is inappropriate and inconsistent with the ... society that America is supposed to be.

I have about 100 pairs of pajamas. I like to see people dressed comfortably.

I'm actually a very moral guy.

It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

Follow your own particular dreams. We are handed a life by peers, parents and society, you can do that or follow your own dreams. Life is short, be a dreamer but be a practical person.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

I've nailed more women than I could count... at least I think they were women

The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it is sex.

Being attacked by right-wing Christians did not bother me. Being attacked by liberal feminists did.

I have no plans to retire. It's the perfect combination of work and play that keeps you young. If I quit work it would be the beginning of the end for me.

I dreamed impossible dreams. And the dreams turned out beyond anything I could possibly imagine. You know, from my point of view, I'm the luckiest cat on the planet.

For me, the magazine was always the heart of what my life was all about, and the other half was living the life.

Part of the sexual revolution is bringing rationality to sexuality. Because when you don't embrace sexuality in a normal way, you get the twisted kinds, and the kinds that destroy lives.

I urge one and all to live this life as if there is no reward in the afterlife and to do it in a moral way that makes it better for you and for those around you, and that leaves this world a little better place than when you found it.

Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

There are many roads to Mecca.

I guess I'm the most successful man I know. I wouldn't trade places with anybody in the world.

What surprises me about getting older is that I remain so young.

I’ve never thought of Playboy, quite frankly, as a sex magazine. I always thought of it as a lifestyle magazine in which sex was one important ingredient.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

You stay in touch with the boy who dreamed impossible dreams.

I think that the major message of my life and what I hope to be remembered for is someone who managed to change the social sexual values of his time absolutely.

I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I'm primarily a playboy philosopher.

I tried to make some difference, and I think I managed to do that.

The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.

You know, from my point of view, I'm the luckiest cat on the planet.

I think that there's nothing wrong with masturbation. If you're not feeling good about your own sexuality and your own body, you're not going to feel good about anything else.

Could I be in a better place and happier than I am today? I don't think so.

I have been married twice, and those were not the happiest times of my life. Part of the problem, quite frankly, is that when you get married, the romance disappears and the children arrive and the love is transferred. It shouldn't be that way, but too often it is transferred to the children.