Taboos Quotations

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.

I'm drawn to the taboos that surround the human body. I find it fascinating that we are repelled by many of the acts and processes that keep us alive.

When facing the public, politicians constantly filter their ideas through a political sieve. 'How will this affect the environmentalists, labor, management?' Sometimes the sieve gets so clogged by political taboos that no new ideas pass through.

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.

Life is livable because we know that whatever we go most of the people we meet will be restrained in their actions towards us by an almost instinctive network of taboos

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.

Today, literate people of the space age, in well-populated countries, are not prepared to accept taboos without question.

The crisis in the pensions budget is dramatic, ... There should be no taboos about discussing longer working lives and increasing both actual and legal retirement ages.

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.