I've done Graham Norton's show three times now. He tackles taboos and subject matter that wouldn't make it past the censors in the States.
Quotes about taboos (16 Quotes)
Through her paintings, she breaks all the taboos of the woman's body and of female sexuality.
It's important that the whole international community come together, speak candidly about it, forget about taboos, forget about conservative ideas with respect to what you should tell young people about. It's the lives of young people that are put at risk by unsafe sex. And, therefore, protect yourself.
Isn't privacy about keeping taboos in their place?
There are no taboos. Every topic is open, however shocking. It is the way that the topics are handled that's important, and that applies whether it is a 15-year-old who is reading your book or someone who is 55.
Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.
Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. 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.
There are no taboos in bed, and there shouldn't be any taboos in bed.
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with secular democracy.
I think the greatest taboos in America are faith and failure.
Gambling has become much more normative in our culture, in our society, and in the media. If there were taboos about women only playing bingo, they've been erased.
Today, literate people of the space age, in well-populated countries, are not prepared to accept taboos without question.
I do not think they are asking for respect in this case. They want me to follow one of their taboos in the public domain. And I think there's a very fundamental principle in secular society that you cannot insist on everybody paying special attention to your religious feelings.
For me, ... there are no real taboos, as long as it's done with respect and sensitivity and the care and creativity of an artist. But is there a clear line between pornography of a sexual and violent nature, and art It is a fine distinction and we'll probably argue about that to the end of our days.
The type of fig leaf which each culture employs to cover its social taboos offers a twofold description of its morality. It reveals that certain unacknowledged behavior exists and it suggests the form that such behavior takes.