1.
Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. Obscene material is material which deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest.
William J. Brennan
2.
Slavery is an obscenity. It is not just stealing someone's labor; it is the theft of an entire life.
Kevin Bales
4.
Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed.
Mark Twain
5.
I shall not attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description (of pornography), and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that.
Potter Stewart
6.
Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.
Henry Miller
7.
I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material but I know it when I see it.
Potter Stewart
9.
It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.
Richard Preston
10.
My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.
Edward Gibbon
11.
What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature?
Rex Stout
12.
I am passionately opposed to the death penalty for anyone . . . I think, myself, that it is an obscenity . . .
Desmond Tutu
13.
Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.
E. B. White
14.
Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.
Brendan Gill
15.
In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled that individual communities should set obscenity standards. Whenever a case is tried, it will be based on a community standard for that particular place.
Larry Flynt
16.
People are obscenities. Would rather be music than be a mass of tubes squeezing semisolids around itself for a few decades before becoming so dribblesome it'll no longer function.
David Mitchell
17.
History proves there is no better advertisement for a book than to condemn it for obscenity.
Holbrook Jackson
19.
I'd heard that Lenny Bruce used a lot of profanity and obscenities in his act, and I was curious.
Sheldon Harnick
21.
Pornography and obscenity...work by specialism and fragmentation. They deal with a figure without a ground - situations in which the human factor is suppressed in favor of sensations and kicks.
Marshall McLuhan
22.
... Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.
Matthew Woodring Stover