My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the obscurity of a learned language.

— Gibbon, Edward

Here is the piece. If you can't say fornicate can you say copulate or if not that can you say co-habit? If not that would have to say consummate I suppose. Use your own good taste and judgment.

— Hemingway, Ernest

Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff.

— Lawrence, D. H.

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.

— Marcuse, Herbert

Obscenity is a cleansing process, whereas pornography only adds to the murk.

— Miller, Henry

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

— Nietzsche, Friedrich

Obscenity is whatever happens to shock some elderly and ignorant magistrate.

— Russell, Bertrand

Obscenity, which is ever blasphemy against the divine beauty in life... is a monster for which the corruption of society forever brings forth new food, which it devours in secret.

— Shelley, Percy Bysshe

Shocking writing is like murder: the questions the jury must decide are the questions of motive and intent.

— White, E(lwyn) B(rooks)

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

— Wilde, Oscar