Bruno Venuti > Bruno's Quotes

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”
― Albert Einstein

“For peace to reign on Earth, humans must evolve into new beings who have learned to see the whole first.”
― Immanuel Kant

“No woman can call herself free who does not control her own body.”
― Margaret Sanger

“Women's liberation and empowerment are terms feminists started using to talk about casting off the limitations imposed upon women and demanding equality. We have perverted these words. The freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough freedom; it is not the only 'women's issue' worth paying attention to. And we are not even free in the sexual arena. We have simply adopted a new norm, a new role to play: lusty, busty exhibitionist. There are other choices. If we are really going to be sexually liberated, we need to make room for a range of options as wide as the variety of human desire. We need to allow ourselves the freedom to figure out what we internally want from sex instead of mimicking whatever popular culture holds up to us as sexy. That would be liberation.”
― Ariel Levy

“Without a doubt there are some women who feel their most sexual with their vaginas waxed, their labia trimmed, their breasts enlarged, and their garments flossy and scant. I am happy for them. I wish them many blissful and lubricious loops around the pole. But there are many other women (and, yes, men) who feel constrained in this environment, who would be happier and feel hotter--more empowered, more sexually liberated, and all the rest of it--if they explored other avenues of expression and entertainment.”
― Ariel Levy

“There are some women who are probably genuinely aroused by the idea of being photographed naked. But I think we can safely assume that many more women appear in Playboy for the simple reason that they are paid to. Which is fine. But 'because I was paid to' is not the same thing as 'I'm taking control of my sexuality.”
― Ariel Levy

“Sex is one of the most interesting things we as humans have to play with, and we've reduced it to polyester underpants and implants. We are selling ourselves unbelievably short.”
― Ariel Levy, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture

“You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you.”
― Isadora Duncan, Isadora Speaks: Uncollected Writings and Speeches of Isadora Duncan

“The greatest feminists have also been the greatest lovers. I'm thinking not only of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley, but of Anais Nin, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and of course Sappho. You cannot divide creative juices from human juices. And as long as juicy women are equated with bad women, we will err on the side of being bad.”
― Erica Jong

“A book burrows into your life in a very profound way because the experience of reading is not passive.”
― Erica Jong

“the body is wiser than its inhabitants. the body is the soul. the body is god’s messenger.”
― Erica Jong

“Never depend upon institutions or government to solve any problem. All social movements are founded by, guided by, motivated and seen through by the passion of individuals. ”
― Margaret Mead

“The anthropologist Margaret Mead concluded in 1948, after observing seven different ethnic groups in the Pacific Islands, that different cultures made different forms of female sexual experience seem normal and desirable. The capacity for orgasm in women, she found, is a learned response, which a given culture can help or can fail to help its women to develop. Mead believed that a woman's sexual fulfillment, and the positive meaning of her sexuality in her own mind, depend upon three factors:
1: She must live in a culture that recognizes female desire as being of value;
2: Her culture must allow her to understand her sexual anatomy;
3: And her culture must teach the various sexual skills that give women orgasms.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“For I conclude that the enemy is not lipstick, but guilt itself; that we deserve lipstick, if we want it, AND free speech; we deserve to be sexual AND serious--or whatever we please; we are entitled to wear cowboy boots to our own revolution.”
― Naomi Wolf

“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better.”
― Robert F. Kennedy

“We should be telling girls what they already know but rarely see affirmed: that the lives they lead inside their own self-contained bodies; the skills they attain through their own concentration and rigor, and the unique phase in their lives during which they may explore boys and eroticism at their own pace - these are magical. And they constitute the entrance point to a life cycle of a sexuality that should be held sacred.”
― Naomi Wolf, Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood

“In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has character…”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. Each is the proper guardian of his own health, whether bodily, or mental or spiritual. Mankind are greater gainers by suffering each other to live as seems good to themselves, than by compelling each to live as seems good to the rest.”
― John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

“There is always need of persons not only to discover new truths, and point out when what were once truths are true no longer, but also to commence new practices, and set the example of more enlightened conduct, and better taste and sense in human life.”
― John Stuart Mill

“I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .”
― John Stuart Mill, An examination of Sir William Hamilton's philosophy, and of the principal philosophical questions discussed in his writings

“Be still when you have nothing to say; when genuine passion moves you, say what you've got to say, and say it hot.”
― D.H. Lawrence

“A woman unsatisfied must have luxuries. But a woman who loves a man would sleep on a board”
― D.H. Lawrence

“Every true artist is the salvation of every other. Only artists produce for each other a world that is fit to live in.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love

“Be a good animal,true to your instincts.”
― D.H. Lawrence, The White Peacock

“Obscenity only comes in when the mind despises and fears the body, and the body hates and resists the mind.”
― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

“Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
― Denis Diderot

“[L]e philosophe n'a jamais tué de prêtres et le prêtre a tué beaucoup de philosophes...

(The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has killed a great many philosophers.)”
― Denis Diderot, Political Writings

“Happiest are the people who give most happiness to others”
― Denis Diderot

“Everybody says sex is obscene. The only true obscenity is war.”
― Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer