“
When people have tried everything and have discovered that nothing works, they will tend to revert to what they know best—which will often be the tribe, the totem, or the taboo.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens
“
The startling truth is that our best efforts for civil rights, international
peace, population control, conservation of natural resources, and
assistance to the starving of the earth—urgent as they are—will destroy
rather than help if made in the present spirit. For, as things stand, we
have nothing to give. If our own riches and our own way of life are not
enjoyed here, they will not be enjoyed anywhere else. Certainly they
will supply the immediate jolt of energy and hope that methedrine, and
similar drugs, give in extreme fatigue. But peace can be made only by
those who are peaceful, and love can be shown only by those who love.
No work of love will flourish out of guilt, fear, or hollowness of heart,
just as no valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no
capacity for living now.
”
”
Alan W. Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
“
Ready to meet my best friend, then?"
I clipped my vest together in front and smiled tightly. "Should I bring a bottle of wine? Any taboo topics? Politics, life after death?"
"Yeah, just stay away from that one entirely.
”
”
Lia Habel (Dearly, Departed (Gone With the Respiration, #1))
“
Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.
”
”
Christine Stockton (Sluts)
“
It is our custom
to consume
the person we love.
Taboo flesh: swollen
genitalia nipples
the scrotum the vulva
the soles of the feet
the palm of the hand
heart and liver taste best.
Cannibalism is blessed.
I'll wear your jawbone
round my neck
listen to your vertebrae
bone tapping bone in my wrists.
I'll string your fingers round my waist -
what a rigorous embrace.
Over my heart I'll wear
a brooch with a lock of hair.
Nights I'll sleep cradling
your skull sharpening
my teeth on your toothless grin.
Sundays there's Mass and communion
and I'll put your relics to rest.
”
”
Gloria E. Anzaldúa (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)
“
My wounds were someone else’s lesson. What would I tell them? Maybe not to fall in love with your gay best friend. That would be a good start. But I can’t regret it. Love wasn’t to blame for my own stupidity. I loved loving Noah, even unrequited, it served a purpose in my life, it’s filled a hole for years and that was my own doing, my eyes were open.
”
”
V. Theia (It Was Always Love (Taboo Love #2))
“
Do as you like, a minimal maxim, an old favorite of mine, so exalting and at the same time so difficult as a Rabelesian rule. I hold the liberation
theory that the best writers liberate the language from taboos, tattoos, cockatoos, repetitions, old fashion repressions and expressions, clichés, fetters, and so forth. For this reason I call it sometimes liberature for short, this liberating literature.
”
”
Julián Ríos
“
All I’m arguing for really is that we should have a conversation where the best ideas really thrive, where there’s no taboo against criticizing bad ideas, and where everyone who shows up, in order to get their ideas entertained, has to meet some obvious burdens of intellectual rigor and self-criticism and honesty—and when people fail to do that, we are free to stop listening to them. What religion has had up until this moment is a different set of rules that apply only to it, which is you have to respect my religious certainty even though I’m telling you I arrived at it irrationally.
”
”
Sam Harris
“
Go without. This option is almost taboo in our culture. It seems radical to many people. Why would I go without when I could just buy a new one? Often this option is the best option, though. When we go without, it forces us to question our stuff, it forces us to discover whether or not we need it—and sometimes we discover life without it is actually better than before.
”
”
Joshua Fields Millburn (Minimalism: Essential Essays)
“
Does God exist?
Unlike many people, this had not been the great inner debate of her life. Under the old Communist regime, the official line in schools had been that life ended with death, and she had gotten used to the idea. On the other hand, her parents’ generation and her grandparents’ generation still went to church, said prayers, and went on pilgrimages, and were utterly convinced that God listened to what they said.
At twenty-four, having experienced everything she could experience—and that was no small achievement—Veronika was almost certain that everything ended with death. That is why she had chosen suicide: freedom at last. Eternal oblivion.
In her heart of hearts, though, there was still a doubt: What if God did exist? Thousands of years of civilization had made of suicide a taboo, an affront to all religious codes: Man struggles to survive, not to succumb. The human race must procreate. Society needs workers. A couple has to have a reason to stay together, even when love has ceased to exist, and a country needs soldiers, politicians and artists.
If God exists, and I truly don’t believe he does, he will know that there are limits to human understanding. He was the one who created this confusion in which there is poverty, injustice, greed, and loneliness. He doubtless had the best of intentions, but the results have proved disastrous; if God exists, he will be generous with those creatures who chose to leave this Earth early, and he might even apologize for having made us spend time here.
To hell with taboos and superstitions. Her devout mother would say: “God knows the past, the present, and the future.” In that case, he had placed her in this world in the full knowledge that she would end up killing herself, and he would not be shocked by her actions.
Veronika began to feel a slight nausea, which became rapidly more intense.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
“
It’s just human nature – isn’t it? – to be more attracted to something that’s taboo. If someone tells you not to smoke, you wanna smoke. If they say, ‘Don’t do drugs,’ you wanna do drugs. That’s why I’ve always thought that the best way to stop people taking drugs is to legalise the f**king things. It would take people about five seconds to realise that being an addict is a terribly unattractive and pathetic way to be, whereas at the moment it still has that kind of rebel cool vibe to it, y’know?
”
”
Ozzy Osbourne (I Am Ozzy)
“
Maybe you shouldn’t trust me at all. The things I want to do to you, baby girl. I want to fucking defile you.
”
”
Katee Robert (My Dad's Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #3))
“
This is how it is with us. Rough and dirty and all-consuming.
”
”
Katee Robert (My Dad's Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #3))
“
I soak it up like the best kind of alcohol, not caring that it will hurt in the end. I want it now. I want him. “Kiss me,” I gasp.
”
”
Katee Robert (Your Dad Will Do (A Touch of Taboo, #1))
“
We do not need a new religion or a new bible. We need a new experience—a new feeling of what it is to be “I.” The lowdown (which is, of course, the secret and profound view) on life is that our normal sensation of self is a hoax, or, at best, a temporary role that we are playing, or have been conned into playing—with our own tacit consent, just as every hypnotized person is basically willing to be hypnotized. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.
”
”
Alan W. Watts (The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
“
Their hands are everywhere, touching each other, pulling each other closer, which drives them deeper inside me. I am merely the vessel for their lust and, fuck, it’s so hot I can barely stand it. I moan and roll my hips as much as I can, chasing the building pressure deep inside me.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
Democracy without accountability is nothing but rule by the mob. As long as we claim the right to vote, we also assume responsibility for that vote; and if an opinion is good enough to share, then it is good enough to defend, to challenge, and (most importantly) to change if and when need be. Social taboos against discussing those most consequential of topics for fear of collateral feelings amount to nothing but a cowardly kind of nihilism best abandoned.
”
”
Shmuel Pernicone (Why We Resist: Letter From a Young Patriot in the Age of Trump)
“
At this point, I must describe an important study carried out by Clare W. Graves of Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. on deterioration of work standards. Professor Graves starts from the Maslow-McGregor assumption that work standards deteriorate when people react against workcontrol systems with boredom, inertia, cynicism... A fourteen-year study led to the conclusion that, for practical purposes, we may divide people up into seven groups, seven personality levels, ranging from totally selfpreoccupied and selfish to what Nietzsche called ‘a selfrolling wheel’-a thoroughly self-determined person, absorbed in an objective task. This important study might be regarded as an expansion of Shotover’s remark that our interest in the world is an overflow of our interest in ourselves—and that therefore nobody can be genuinely ‘objective’ until they have fully satiated the subjective cravings. What is interesting—and surprising—is that it should not only be possible to distinguish seven clear personality-ypes, but that these can be recognised by any competent industrial psychologist. When Professor Graves’s theories were applied in a large manufacturing organisation—and people were slotted into their proper ‘levels’—the result was a 17% increase in production and an 87% drop in grumbles.
The seven levels are labelled as follows:
(1) Autistic
(2) Animistic
(3) Awakening and fright
(4) Aggressive power seeking
(5) Sociocentric
(6) Aggressive individualistic
(7) Pacifist individualistic.
The first level can be easily understood: people belonging to it are almost babylike, perhaps psychologically run-down and discouraged; there is very little to be done with these people. The animistic level would more probably be encountered in backward countries: primitive, superstitious, preoccupied with totems and taboos, and again poor industrial material. Man at the third level is altogether more wide-awake and objective, but finds the complexity of the real world frightening; the best work is to be got out of him by giving him rules to obey and a sense of hierarchical security. Such people are firm believers in staying in the class in which they were born. They prefer an autocracy. The majority of Russian peasants under the Tsars probably belonged to this level. And a good example of level four would probably be the revolutionaries who threw bombs at the Tsars and preached destruction. In industry, they are likely to be trouble makers, aggressive, angry, and not necessarily intelligent. Management needs a high level of tact to get the best out of these. Man at level five has achieved a degree of security—psychological and economic—and he becomes seriously preoccupied with making society run smoothly. He is the sort of person who joins rotary clubs and enjoys group activities. As a worker, he is inferior to levels three and four, but the best is to be got out of him by making him part of a group striving for a common purpose.
Level six is a self-confident individualist who likes to do a job his own way, and does it well. Interfered with by authoritarian management, he is hopeless. He needs to be told the goal, and left to work out the best way to achieve it; obstructed, he becomes mulish.
Level seven is much like level six, but without the mulishness; he is pacifistic, and does his best when left to himself. Faced with authoritarian management, he either retreats into himself, or goes on his own way while trying to present a passable front to the management.
Professor Graves describes the method of applying this theory in a large plant where there was a certain amount of unrest. The basic idea was to make sure that each man was placed under the type of supervisor appropriate to his level. A certain amount of transferring brought about the desired result, mentioned above—increased production, immense decrease in grievances, and far less workers leaving the plant (7% as against 21% before the change).
”
”
Colin Wilson (New Pathways in Psychology: Maslow & the Post-Freudian Revolution)
“
Scholars have protested that the engraver was merely incompetent. “Droeshout’s deficiencies are, alas, only too gross,” sighed Professor Samuel Schoenbaum. But it is hard to believe that a professionally commissioned artist would be so inept as to accidentally make two left arms, two right eyes, a huge head, and all of the other alleged deformities. The First Folio was an expensive undertaking, several years in the making. The anti-theatrical puritan William Prynne complained that “Shakespeare’s plays are printed in the best crown paper, far better than most bibles.
”
”
Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
“
For anyone with eyes to see, there can be no doubt that religious faith remains a perpetual source of human conflict. Religion persuades otherwise intelligent men and women to not think, or to think badly, about questions of civilizational importance. And yet it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in our society, or to even observe that some religions are less compassionate and less tolerant than others. What is worst in us (outright delusion) has been elevated beyond the reach of criticism, while what is best (reason and intellectual honesty) must remain hidden, for fear of giving offense.
”
”
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
“
We are all bisexual to begin with. That is a fact of our condition. And we are all responsive to sexual stimuli from our own as well as from the opposite sex. Certain societies at certain times, usually in the interest of maintaining the baby supply, have discouraged homosexuality. Other societies, particularly militaristic ones, have exalted it. But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime ... despite the best efforts of our puritan tribe to make it all three. Homosexuality is as natural as heterosexuality.
”
”
Gore Vidal
“
She thought about Switzerland. Where a smile will give you away as an American. Where what isn't taboo is de rigueur. Cold, efficient Switzerland. where the woman are comely and the men are well groomed and everyone wears a determined face. Switzerland. The roof of Europe. Glacier carved. Most beautiful where it is most uninhabitable. Switzerland with its twenty-six shipshape cantons. Industrious Switzerland. Novartis. Rolex. Nestlé. Swatch. So often was Zürich ranked as one of the world's best cities. She thought about that, then conceded that if she hadn't been so sad the last nine years she might have seen it.
”
”
Jill Alexander Essbaum
“
The most obvious is religious faith. To take something on faith means to believe it without good reason, so by definition a faith in the existence of supernatural entities clashes with reason. Religions also commonly clash with humanism whenever they elevate some moral good above the well-being of humans, such as accepting a divine savior, ratifying a sacred narrative, enforcing rituals and taboos, proselytizing other people to do the same, and punishing or demonizing those who don’t. Religions can also clash with humanism by valuing souls above lives, which is not as uplifting as it sounds. Belief in an afterlife implies that health and happiness are not such a big deal, because life on earth is an infinitesimal portion of one’s existence; that coercing people into accepting salvation is doing them a favor; and that martyrdom may be the best thing that can ever happen to you.
”
”
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
“
So Dad was a tedious, well-connected workaholic. But the other thing you need to understand is that Mom was a living wet dream. A former Guess model and Miller Lite girl, she was tall, curvy and gorgeous. At thirty-eight, she had somehow managed to remain ageless and maintained her killer body. She’s five-foot-nine with never-ending legs, generous breasts and full hips that scoop dramatically into her slim waist. People who say Barbie’s proportions are unrealistic obviously never met my stepmother. Her face is pretty too, with long eyelashes, sculpted cheekbones and big, blue eyes that tease and smile at the same time. Her long brown hair rests on her shoulders in thick, tousled layers like in one of those Pantene Pro-V commercials.
One memory seared in to my brain from my early teenage years is of Mom parading around the house one evening in nothing but her heels and underwear. I was sitting on the couch in the living room watching TV when a flurry of long limbs and blow-dried hair burst in front of the screen.
“Teddy-bear. Do you know where Silvia left the dry cleaning? I’m running late for dinner with the Blackwells and I can’t find my red cocktail dress.”
Mom stood before me in matching off-white, La Perla bra and panties and Manolo Blahnik stilettos. Some subtle gold hoop earrings hung from her ears and a tiny bit of mascara on her eye lashes highlighted her sparkling, blue eyes. Aside from the missing dress, she was otherwise ready to go.
“I think she left them hanging on the chair next to the other sofa,” I said, trying my best not to gape at Mom’s perfect body.
Mom trotted across the room, her heels tocking on the hard wood floor. I watched her slim, sexy back as she lifted the dry cleaning onto the sofa and then bent over to sort through the garments. My eyes followed her long mane of brown hair down to her heart-shaped ass. Her panties stretched tightly across each cheek as she bent further down.
“Found it!” She cried, springing back upright, causing her 35Cs to bounce up and down from the sudden motion. They were thrusting proudly off her ribcage and bulging out over the fabric of the balconette bra like two titanic eggs. Her supple skin pushed out over the silk edges. And then she was gone as quickly as she had arrived, her long legs striding back down the hallway.
”
”
C.R.R. Crawford (Sins from my Stepmother: Forbidden Desires)
“
I’m like most women. I want a steamy romance novel, or something sweet and tender.” “I knew the romance genre was big, especially with women, but I never really understood why.” “Seriously? Let’s just say that the next best thing to having sex, is reading about people having sex. If you’re not able to snag any for yourself, you damn sure want to be reading about two people who have guaranteed odds at doing the deed.
”
”
Lustful Desires Bundle (FILLING HER UP -- Love Taboo Tales? Older Men, Younger Women - 8 Lewd Short Stories of Naughty First Times)
“
It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick and mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in a dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animal, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world - all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it - or the worst, according to the probabilities.
”
”
Charles Dickens
“
Holy shit. The idea of being owned by him steals my ability to make words.
”
”
Katee Robert (My Dad's Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #3))
“
Best-selling novelist Paul Tremblay writes that horror really works only when it “push[es] and prod[s] at moral boundaries” and forces its audience to “confront personal and societal taboos.” In fact, he suggests that horror films need a “progressive” vision to really pull us out to sea on a dark tide.
”
”
W. Scott Poole (Dark Carnivals: Modern Horror and the Origins of American Empire)
“
I want you.” He states it as fact, as if he’s not crossing a thousand different lines by putting it to voice. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you, all done up in white and marrying my best friend.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
I keep meaning to stop buying new ones until my reading catches up to my purchases, but it never happens.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
Raised on Walt Disney, most of us hear the phrase “Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?” and the first image that pops into our heads is that of the evil stepmother with her stark white face and red lips in the animated film and book spin-offs of Snow White. But like other folktales collected by the Brothers Grimm, their original source—and indeed their first version of the story, published in 1812—wasn’t about an evil stepmother but a mother-daughter pair, and it was Snow White’s own mother who was her envious antagonist. In the original version, the beautiful queen who pricks her finger while sewing and wishes for a child “as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the sewing frame” gives birth to Snow White. It is Snow White’s own mother who, obsessed with her own beauty, checks her magic mirror when Snow White is seven only to hear that her daughter, not she, is “the fairest of them all.” It is Snow White’s mother who tries her best to have her daughter killed throughout the rest of the story until innocence trumps maternal envy in the end. By 1819, the Grimm Brothers had banished to the cupboard of taboos the psychological truth mirrored in the original folktale—of the potential rivalry between a mother and daughter, or maternal envy—by having the “real” mother die after giving birth and a sinister stepmother take her place.
”
”
Peg Streep (Mean Mothers: Overcoming the Legacy of Hurt)
“
In a society that consists of “a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customers, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality...tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law...is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.”
---Sir John Mortimer, British barrister and novelist
”
”
Jean Hackel
“
In a society that consists of “a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customers, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality...tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law...is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.
”
”
John Mortimer
“
In a society that consists of a loose federation of groups with their own languages, customers, taboos, freedoms, courting habits and senses of morality...tolerance demands that no one group may be allowed to impose its own moral views, however strongly held, upon another; still less should they be able to use the severe sanctions of the criminal law to do so. The law...is at its best when it is enforcing practical remedies for specific crimes; it is at its worst when it tries to enforce the morality of one group in society upon another which may, for quite sincere and logical reasons, refuse to accept it.
”
”
John Mortimer
“
Shockingly, she’s there, but it’s even more shocking that she’s pretty. She is pretty, sweeter, and cuter than me. Clear and white skin, pink lips. Every boys’ dream! I couldn’t stop gawking at her. Kellie has amazing big almost turquoise eyes that open wide and slight rosy cheekbones, like a model. And the best part of it all is her boobs look as big as mine. People are nudging and pushing us because she’s and, I am obstructing the entranceway, but we just stood there, anyways when we had that chat.
Oh, I forgot to say that a girl was peeing behind a car when looking out. It kind of slipped my mind. It’s a cold night, those intents better have a snuggle buddy to stay warm, and a good sleeping bag.
Maddie and Liv catch a glimpse of her walking by, and their mouths both drop open. ‘What the… hell… is that relay Karly little sister?’ Jenny and her boy turn to see what we’re both them staring at. I see Shy- looking to form the steps. Jenny goes ashen at first-she looks afraid, which is beyond strange, for her… because of her- the type to say you’re never too young to go down and get down. She loves to see young girls fall to their knees; I call it- ‘Fallen too You.’ It’s when you get up everything for a boy, like your dignity, pride, and justice.
”
”
Marcel Ray Duriez (Young Taboo (Nevaeh))
“
The best way to get cooperation among volatile, erotic primates is to regulate sexual relations—who can mate with whom, who can live with whom regularly, and so on. By setting up such customs and marriage taboos you establish families and provide sexual partners between families. In a word, the invention of sexual codes establishes harmony and cooperation in mating units, and in bands composed of such units.
”
”
Ernest Becker (The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man)
“
Be careful if you find yourself in a place where only acceptable truths are allowed. Taboos are a sign of insecurity. Only fragile castles need to be protected by the highest of walls. The best answers are discovered not by eliminating competing answers, but by engaging with them. And engagement happens in groups built, not on taboos and dogma, but on a foundation that celebrates diverse thinking.
”
”
Ozan Varol (Awaken Your Genius: Escape Conformity, Ignite Creativity, and Become Extraordinary)
“
I want to give you to Derek. One night. I want to watch him eat your pussy, make you come, fuck you.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
That’s one hell of a gift, Grayson.” “You can thank me later.” Derek’s gaze doesn’t lose its heat as he looks at my husband. “Oh, I will.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
I want you.” He states it as fact as if he’s not crossing a thousand different lines by putting it to voice. “I’ve wanted you since the first time I saw you, all done up in white and marrying my best friend.
”
”
Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
“
The priest and his desires
Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest,
Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist,
Bound by his sanctum and religion,
He tries not to give in to any seduction,
Adam and Eve blamed the devil,
The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil,
He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires,
And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires,
He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass,
But he is distracted and sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass,
At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine,
And when he stands face to face with a beautiful woman his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’”
His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks,
He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks,
He often touches his cross that he wears always,
Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days,
He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession,
“My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession,
Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God?
For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd,
It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons,
In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens,
To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book,
But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look,
I wonder if I shall quit clergy,
And adopt this new synergy,
I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse,
And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips,
Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee?
Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and Thee?
Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me,
And without being me, how can I anything else be,
Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man,
Never to fulfillmy own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan,
So let me live with my state and the social taboo,
While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.”
The Lord smiles at him,
“It is your personal battle and it is grim,
You desire her, her face, her charming ways,
You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days,
But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know,
So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow,
And before you fall too low,
Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow,
Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses,
I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.”
Said the Lord in His emphatic voice,
And the priest stood up and made the right choice!
To love the woman he loved and missed,
And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed!
Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds 1983 Drama
”
”
Javid Ahmad Tak
“
The priest and his desires
Not alone, but a lonely monastery priest,
Resisting hard not to venture out and pursue the need for love and passion driven heist,
Bound by his sanctum and religion,
He tries hard not to give in to any form of seduction,
Adam and Eve blamed the devil,
The priest is baffled to decide who shall he blame for this evil?
He rolls and turns restlessly in the bed of his desires,
And every night after the Church service he deals with these raging fires,
He is dressed in his black robe on the much anticipated Sunday mass,
But he is distracted when he sees passions and desires cast on peoples faces and even on mosaic glass,
At the end of the service he serves all some fine and red wine,
And when he comes face to face with a beautiful woman, his inner self says “I wish you were mine!’”
His Sunday night is spent in her curled hair locks,
He is shackled to her beautiful face and desires that fasten around him like unbreakable locks,
He often touches his cross that he wears always,
Still his nights are restless and now it is so even during the sunny Spring days,
He bows before the Altar and makes a solemn confession,
“My Lord! her face and her overpowering beauty have become my obsession,
Am I still worthy of worshipping you my God?
For I have silently started worshiping this feeling of loving her and I do not feel odd,
It is her thoughts that possess me even during my sermons,
In her absence, not yours My Lord, everything presents itself like bad omens,
To tame my wandering thoughts I refer to the Holy Book,
But through it too peeps her face and her mesmerising look,
I wonder if I shall quit clergy,
And adopt this new synergy?
I am drowning farther and farther in this mental eclipse,
And I only want to think of her beautiful face, her warm skin and her red lips,
Shall I forsake my black robe, My Lord, and not Thee?
Or Forsake her and thereby my black robe and as well Thee?
Because without her I do not feel anything that is a part of me,
And without being me, how can I anything else be,
Perhaps I am supposed to be a man of God but not a man,
Never to fulfil my own desires for I am busy fulfilling Your plan,
So let me live with my state and the social taboo,
While every night I place my desires in the coffin along with the happy morning cuckoo.”
The Lord smiles at him,
“It is your personal battle and it is grim,
You desire her, her face, her charming ways,
You think of her during nights and during the bountiful days,
But you think of me too and that is enough for me to know,
So seek her and kiss her grace, for then you shall better baptise in my glow,
And before you fall too low,
Rise to your calling and you shall reap as you shall sow,
Whether you wear a black robe or her kisses,
I shall judge you on how you made others feel with or without your kisses.”
Said the Lord in His emphatic voice,
And the priest stood up and made the right choice!
To love the woman he loved and missed,
And he felt something divine within him, whenever her deep beauty he kissed!
Source of inspiration : The Thorn Birds . 1983 Drama
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Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
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Remember, too, that in almost all the stories you enjoy there have to be bad people as well as good people, for the thrill of the tale is to find out how the good people will get the better of the bad. It’s the same as when we play cards. At the beginning of the game we shuffle them all into a mess, which is like the bad things in the world, but the point of the game is to put the mess into good order, and the one who does it best is the winner. Then we shuffle the cards once more and play again, and so it goes with the world.
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Alan Watts (The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are)
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1628 a theologian compiling a list of the best English poets (Geoffrey Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, and so on) added, in Latin, “that well-known poet who takes a name from shaking and spear.” The phrase immediately jumps out from the list of other names. Why not simply give him as “William Shakespeare,” like the others? The conspicuous difference suggests something conspicuously different about Shakespeare.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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throwing myself down a mountain and hoping for the best isn’t my idea of a good time, so I bundled up here in our cabin with my e-reader and enough tea to outlast a siege.
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Katee Robert (Gifting Me To His Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #2))
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Your definition of obedient is as flawed as your definition of sorry.
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Katee Robert (My Dad's Best Friend (A Touch of Taboo, #3))
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Over the years, scholars have imagined a Protestant Shakespeare, a secret Catholic Shakespeare, a republican Shakespeare, a monarchist Shakespeare, a heterosexual Shakespeare, a bisexual Shakespeare, a Shakespeare who hated his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who loved his wife (and thus left her the second-best bed), a Shakespeare who, before taking up the pen, must have been a roving actor or a schoolmaster or a lawyer or a soldier or a sailor. Being nothing, Shakespeare can be anything—anything his biographers desire.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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A clergyman named Francis Meres published a book listing Shakespeare among the best English writers and naming a dozen Shakespeare plays: “Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds [comedy and tragedy] for the stage.” Such evidence proves attribution, not actual authorship.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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wanting to create a monument to Shakespeare in the US capital. “The poet is one of our best sources, one of the wells from which we Americans draw our national thought, our faith, and our hope,” Emily Folger explained, drawing on a strain of American literary criticism that saw Shakespeare, paradoxically, as America’s poet. He had influenced the founding fathers, who saw in his villains and tyrants the dangers of monarchy and the need for institutional checks on power. Shakespeare’s history plays heralded the “inauguration of modern democracy,” Walt Whitman wrote, for they put “on record the first full exposé—and by far the most vivid one… of the political theory and results” of a feudal system “which America has come on earth to abnegate and replace.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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10 Common Myths About Fertility Debunked
According to WHO’s latest report of April 2023, worldwide approximately 17% of total population find it difficult to get pregnant. Although fertility is becoming a rising concern today the subject is still taboo within the society. The couples trying to conceive either visit the Best IVF Doctor in Gurgaon or do not discuss the topic openly. According to the Best IVF Specialist in Gurgaon, Dr. Beena Muktesh, MBBS, MS, Infertility & IVF Specialist, an inability to discuss the topic openly causes the couples to believe in prevalent myths running down the mills. It is important for us as a society to debunk such myths, speak openly, and visit the doctor at the earliest.
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Dr. Beena Muktesh
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wandered through Stratford, waiting to hear back. The main downtown area was small and pedestrian, centered on the local tourist industry. Most of the buildings were in the half-timbered Tudor style, lending an air of Renaissance authenticity to the town. Quaint street signs helpfully funneled bumbling tourists toward the attractions: “Shakespeare’s Birthplace” or “Holy Trinity Church and Shakespeare’s Grave.” On High Street, I passed the Hathaway Tea Rooms and a pub called the Garrick Inn. Farther along, a greasy-looking cafe called the Food of Love, a cutesy name taken from Twelfth Night (“ If music be the food of love, play on”). The town was Elizabethan kitsch—plus souvenir shops, a Subway, a Starbucks, a cluster of high-end boutiques catering to moneyed out-of-towners, more souvenir shops. Shakespeare’s face was everywhere, staring down from signs and storefronts like a benevolent big brother. The entrance to the “Old Bank estab. 1810” was gilded ornately with an image of Shakespeare holding a quill, as though he functioned as a guarantee of the bank’s credibility. Confusingly, there were several Harry Potter–themed shops (House of Spells, the Creaky Cauldron, Magic Alley). You could almost feel the poor locals scheming how best to squeeze a few more dollars out of the tourists. Stratford and Hogwarts, quills and wands, poems and spells. Then again, maybe the confusion was apt: Wasn’t Shakespeare the quintessential boy wizard, magically endowed with inexplicable powers?
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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even tenured professors don’t write about the authorship,” I pressed him. “The industry takes over,” the professor said with a shrug. “From the top to the bottom—the fat sums for best-selling Shakespeare biographies to the actors in local Shakespeare productions. They don’t want to overturn the applecart, which is treating them quite well.” “But do you think universities should allow research into the authorship?” “Absolutely, of course. Why not?
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, the 2004 New York Times best seller by the Harvard scholar Stephen Greenblatt. “Let us imagine that Shakespeare found himself from boyhood fascinated by language, obsessed with the magic of words,” Greenblatt begins. Let us imagine. It is alluring, inviting, and entirely make-believe.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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Ireland confessed to the forgeries, and Malone’s book was a best seller.
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Elizabeth Winkler (Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies: How Doubting the Bard Became the Biggest Taboo in Literature)
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I understand now why sex is taboo within the confines of sanctity and truth. It is a binding agent. Everything you've said moments before suddenly holds reverence, and it takes a pronounced period of abstinence to unbind from this lewd knot. I arrive home to find my mother seated alone at our dinner table equipped for a gathering of six.
She's been waiting for me, I can feel it. She worries herself with a pot of tea and a box of macarons from Ladurée.
And I look at her with borrowed eyes - fearing her solitude, her size and her calm. She is relieved that I'm home, but I'm no longer at an age where she can scold me. Instead she offers me a cup of tea. Her best approach is to paint our home into a place I'd rather be.
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Lethokuhle Msimang (The Frightened)
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The best answer is that oral sex carried a sort of taboo tax. At the time, it was considered a form of perversion, especially by religious-minded folks, since it satisfied the lust requirements of sex without fulfilling the reproductive requirements. The Everleigh Club was of course happy to profit from this taboo.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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The idea of her husband watching her as she made love with her best friend was so naughty it was practically taboo, yet at the same time, it was utterly thrilling.
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Brianna Skylark (His Birthday Treat (FFM Threesome and Ménage Romance #2))
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Pagans who take the time to develop their philosophy about how beliefs operate are more easily able to view beliefs and belief systems—including mythologies, religions, governments, cultural taboos, and corporate philosophies—with objectivity. When you are not emotionally bound to a belief, you are able to explore the direct relationship between it and the type of world that has been or can be built from it. Armed with this insight, you can then choose the beliefs that best work for you and the kind of reality you want to experience. Your objectivity will also allow you to examine your beliefs whenever you wish to see if they are meeting your expectations, and if not, to begin to change them.
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Joyce Higginbotham (Paganism: An Introduction to Earth- Centered Religions)
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Heather Mills
As a tireless campaigner for many charitable causes, Heather Mills joined Diana in support of the banishment of land mines all over the world. For her efforts against land mines, Ms. Mills was awarded the inaugural UNESCO Children in Need Award. She is also Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Association, and she has been active in helping amputees by promoting the use of prostheses.
Diana, Princess of Wales, was a truly remarkable human being. All too often today we refer to people as icons; in Diana’s case, the word is wholly appropriate. She was a wife, a mother, a humanitarian, and a true ambassador.
Despite what the press wanted us to believe, Diana didn’t court publicity. On the contrary, she did far more behind the scenes to help people than in front.
Her willingness to reveal her own frailties has, I am sure, encouraged many people to seek help and come to terms with their own personal problems.
She was able to reach out to people in a way that few can. In the early days of HIV and AIDS, when everyone was so afraid of this so-called new disease, Diana’s simple gesture of shaking hands with an AIDS patient at a hospital in London broke down the taboo and removed the stigma around the disease. Her palace advisers had initially tried to dissuade her from making this gesture, but Diana--who always led with her heart--went against them and did what she believed to be right.
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Larry King (The People's Princess: Cherished Memories of Diana, Princess of Wales, From Those Who Knew Her Best)
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It needs only to be pointed out that religious speculation could be nothing alien to a country that has produced the Buddha, Vardharmana Mahavira, Nagarjuna, Kabir and Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, to name but the best known of the spiritual figures. The Hindu world with all its rigid taboos was strangely flexible. It was in part this heritage of flexibility which enabled the Indian Renaissance thinkers to meet the challenge of British rule in intellectual and philosophical terms. Nirad
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Suu Kyi, Aung San (Freedom from Fear: And Other Writings)
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A clue is a key which unlocks a box full of keys - those peculiarly tempting arrangements of circumstance and fate are points of departure which lead to infinite realms of mystery that beckon with the taboo of hidden knowledge. I am compelled to follow where the curling finger of intrigue flits seductively among shadows whose origins lie in primeval antiquity. The Forbidden Occult is forever enshrined in the luminous cathedral of my imagination. Every philosopher's stone I look under carries my mind aloft on the fairy wings of discovery to ever higher treasures of exponentially expanding conscious awareness.
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Sean Terrence Best (Cloak of the Devil)
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The Lockean logic of custom suggests strongly that open-source hackers observe the customs they do in order to defend some kind of expected return from their effort. The return must be more significant than the effort of homesteading projects, the cost of maintaining version histories that document “chain of title”, and the time cost of making public notifications and waiting before taking adverse possession of an orphaned project. Furthermore, the “yield” from open source must be something more than simply the use of the software, something else that would be compromised or diluted by forking. If use were the only issue, there would be no taboo against forking, and open-source ownership would not resemble land tenure at all. In fact, this alternate world (where use is the only yield, and forking is unproblematic) is the one implied by existing open-source licenses. We can eliminate some candidate kinds of yield right away. Because you can’t coerce effectively over a network connection, seeking power is right out. Likewise, the open-source culture doesn’t have anything much resembling money or an internal scarcity economy, so hackers cannot be pursuing anything very closely analogous to material wealth (e.g. the accumulation of scarcity tokens). There is one way that open-source activity can help people become wealthier, however — a way that provides a valuable clue to what actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting contract, or a book deal. This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that they’re doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love. However, the way such economic side effects are mediated is worth examination.
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Eric S. Raymond (The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary)
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There are no “good” abortions and “bad” abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don’t, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies. For that reason, we simply must talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities, and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, always an impossible decision. Well, we’re not, and it’s not.
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Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
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playing with numbers was still considered taboo, a subject best left to the later years, despite America’s obvious and enduring math handicap. For too long, what American
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Amanda Ripley (The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way)
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The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best.
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Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
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Eventually she’d come to contemplate suicide. It was an unspeakable act, but the taboo against suicide was predicated upon one’s usefulness to society—one’s duty to others. So what did it matter now? Who would censure her or threaten her with reconditioning if she dared have such dark thoughts?
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Patrice Fitzgerald (Best of Beyond the Stars)
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My body, my work, my voice, my confidence, my power, my determination to demand a life as potent, vibrant, public and complex as any man's. My abortion wasn’t intrinsically significant, but it was my first big grown-up decision – the first time I asserted, unequivocally: ‘I KNOW THE LIFE I WANT AND THIS IS NOT IT"; the moment I stopped being a passenger in my own body and grabbed the rudder...
The truth is I don't give a damn why anyone has an abortion. I believe unconditionally in the right of people with uteruses to decide what grow inside of their body and feeds on their blood and endangers their life and reroutes their future. There are no "good" abortions and "bad" abortions, there are only pregnant people who want them and pregnant people who don't, pregnant people who have access and support and pregnant people who face institutional roadblocks and lies...
For that reason, we simply MUST talk about it. The fact that abortion is still a taboo subject means that opponents of abortion get to define it however suits them best. They can cast those of us who have had abortions as callous monstrosities and seed fear in anyone who might need one by insisting that the procedure is always traumatic, always painful, and always an impossible decision. Well we're not and it's not. The truth is that life is unfathomably complex and every abortion story is as unique as the person who lives it. Some are traumatic, some are even regretted, but plenty are like mine...
My abortion was a normal medical procedure that got tangled up in my bad relationship, my internalized fatphobia, my fear of adulthood, my discomfort with talking about sex; and one that, because of our culture’s obsession with punishing female sexuality and shackling women to the nursery and the kitchen, I was socialized to approach with shame and describe only in whispers. But the procedure itself was the easiest part. Not being able to have one would have been the real trauma.
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Lindy West (Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman)
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The satirist rose up nobly, their chin to the sky. “It is best to raise our Princes on a high hill away from the city, away from the fields and the grasslands where our people do their labor. Far away from the sickness and the filth of the cities, where we have invented new ways to debase and ruin ourselves. Up here our Princes can concern themselves only with trim and taboos! Up here our Princes can play games of principle instead of working in the fields and the filth! Today the taboo is against going uphill too quickly! That is the most important thing!
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Seth Dickinson (The Monster Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade, #2))
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Today’s liberals lack the self-confidence to say the same about intellectual freedom, and have become as keen on censorship as conservatives once were... Like homophobic conservatives, who worry that if societies’ taboos go, the promotion of homosexuality will turn young people gay, they (liberals) worry that if the law allows unpalatable views to escape unpunished, hatred will turn to violence. Hence, they support laws against incitement to racial and religious hatred in Britain and across Europe, against Holocaust denial in Germany and Austria, and against Holocaust denial and denial of the Armenian genocide in France. Hence, they enforce speech codes that mandate the punishment of transgressors in the workplace and the universities. Few liberals have the confidence to say that free speech, like sexual freedom, would not create a terrible society, because they do not trust their fellow citizens. They do not realize that most people in modern democracies do not harbour secret fascist fantasies, and that the best way to respond to those who do is to meet their bad arguments with better arguments.
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Nick Cohen (You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom)