Coitus can scarcely be said to take place in a vacuum; although of itself it appears a biological and physical activity, it is set so deeply within the larger context of human affairs that it serves as a charged microcosm of the variety of attitudes and values to which culture subscribes. Among other things, it may serve as a model of sexual politics on an individual or personal plane.
—Kate Millet (1934–2017) American Feminist, Writer, Sculptor
In libertinage, nothing is frightful, because everything libertinage suggests is also a natural inspiration; the most extraordinary, the most bizarre acts, those which most arrantly seem to conflict with every law, every human institution… even those that are not frightful, and there is not one amongst them all that cannot be demonstrated within the boundaries of nature.
—Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French Political leader, Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, Critic
After mature deliberation of counsel, the good Queen to establish a rule and immutable example unto all posterity, for the moderation and required modesty in a lawful marriage, ordained the number of six times a day as a lawful, necessary and competent limit.
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) French Essayist
All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.
—Evelyn Waugh (1903–66) British Novelist, Essayist, Biographer
There are very few jobs that actually require a penis or vagina. All other jobs should be open to everybody.
—Florynce Kennedy (1916–2000) American Lawyer, Civil Rights Leader, Feminist, Activist
We must reckon with the possibility that something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavorable to the realization of complete satisfaction.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) English Journalist, Author, Media Personality, Satirist
How deep a wound to morals and social purity has that accursed article of the celibacy of the clergy been! Even the best and most enlightened men in Romanist countries attach a notion of impurity to the marriage of a clergyman. And can such a feeling be without its effect on the estimation of the wedded life in general? Impossible! and the morals of both sexes in Spain, Italy, France, and. prove it abundantly.
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English Poet, Literary Critic, Philosopher
Nobody dies from lack of sex. It’s lack of love we die from.
—Unknown
Sex without love is a meaningless experience, but as far as meaningless experiences go its pretty damn good.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Hair is another name for sex.
—Vidal Sassoon (1928–2012) Anglo-American Hairstylist, Businessman
Sex can be fun after eighty, after ninety, and after lunch!
—George Burns (1896–1996) American Comedian
Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it’s one of the best.
—Unknown
Fear of sexuality is the new, disease-sponsored register of the universe of fear in which everyone now lives.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
Inevitably we look upon society, so kind to you, so harsh to us, as an ill-fitting form that distorts the truth; deforms the mind; fetters the will.
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English Novelist
The American ideal of sexuality appears to be rooted in the American ideal of masculinity. This idea has created cowboys and Indians, good guys and bad guys, punks and studs, tough guys and softies, butch and faggot, black and white. It is an ideal so paralytically infantile that it is virtually forbidden—as an unpatriotic act—that the American boy evolve into the complexity of manhood.
—James Baldwin (1924–87) American Novelist, Social Critic
Back in the days when men were hunters and chest beaters and women spent their whole lives worrying about pregnancy or dying in childbirth, they often had to be taken against their will. Men complained that women were cold, unresponsive, frigid. They wanted their women wanton. They wanted their women wild. Now women were finally learning to be wanton and wild—and what happened?. The men wilted.
—Erica Jong (b.1942) American Novelist, Feminist
Sex without love is merely healthy exercise.
—Robert A. Heinlein (1907–88) American Science Fiction Writer
The pleasure of living and the pleasure of the orgasm are identical. Extreme orgasm anxiety forms the basis of the general fear of life.
—Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) Austrian Psychoanalyst
Sex is a part of nature. I go along with nature.
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–62) American Actor, Model, Singer
Religion is probably, after sex, the second oldest resource which human beings have available to them for blowing their minds.
—Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American Writer, Philosopher
Marital intercourse is certainly holy, lawful and praiseworthy in itself and profitable to society, yet in certain circumstances it can prove dangerous, as when through excess the soul is made sick with venial sin, or through the violation and perversion of its primary end, killed by mortal sin; such perversion, detestable in proportion to its departure from the true order, being always mortal sin, for it is never lawful to exclude the primary end of marriage which is the procreation of children.
—Francis de Sales (1567–1622) French Catholic Saint
Sex at age ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
—George Burns (1896–1996) American Comedian
Sexual love is undoubtedly one of the chief things in life, and the union of mental and bodily satisfaction in the enjoyment of love is one of its culminating peaks. Apart from a few queer fanatics, all the world knows this and conducts its life accordingly; science alone is too delicate to admit it.
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) Austrian Psychiatrist, Psychoanalytic
Sex is hardly ever just about sex
—Shirley MacLaine (b.1934) American Actor, Dancer, Author, Activist
Sexual intercourse began in 1963 (which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles first LP.
—Philip Larkin (1922–85) English Poet, Librarian, Novelist
Frigidity is desire imagined by a woman who doesn’t desire the man offering himself to her. It’s the desire of a woman for a man who hasn’t yet come to her, whom she doesn’t yet know. She’s faithful to this stranger even before she belongs to him. Frigidity is the non-desire for whatever is not him.
—Marguerite Duras (1914–96) French Novelist, Playwright
Sex is more than an act of pleasure, its’ the ability to be able to feel so close to a person, so connected, so comfortable that it’s almost breathtaking to the point you feel you can’t take it. And at this moment you’re a part of them.
—Unknown
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
I believe that organic sex, body against body, skin area against skin area, is becoming no longer possible, simply because if anything is to have any meaning for us it must take place in terms of the values and experiences of the media landscape. What we’re getting is a whole new order of sexual fantasies, involving a different order of experiences, like car crashes, like travelling in jet aircraft, the whole overlay of new technologies, architecture, interior design, communications, transport, merchandising. These things are beginning to reach into our lives and change the interior design of our sexual fantasies. We’ve got to recognize that what one sees through the window of the TV screen is as important as what one sees through a window on the street.
—J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) English Novelist, Short Story Writer
Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
—Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) German-born American Actor, Singer
The question of sexual dominance can exist only in the nightmare of that soul which has armed itself, totally, against the possibility of the changing motion of conquest and surrender, which is love.
—James Baldwin (1924–87) American Novelist, Social Critic
Sex between a man and a woman can be absolutely wonderful – provided you get between the right man and the right woman.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Frigidity is largely nonsense. It is this generation’s catchword, one only vaguely understood and constantly misused. Frigid women are few. There is a host of diffident and slow-ripening ones.
—Phyllis McGinley (1905–78) American Children’s Books Writer, Poet, Writer of Children’s Books
There is no such thing as a homosexual or a heterosexual person. There are only homo—or heterosexual acts. Most people are a mixture of impulses if not practices.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
Money, it turned out, was exactly like sex; you thought of nothing else if you didn’t have it and thought of other things if you did.
—James Baldwin (1924–87) American Novelist, Social Critic
For once you must try not to shirk the facts: mankind is kept alive by bestial acts.
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German Poet, Playwright, Theater Personality
Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interest of mankind, and is that state of good to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.
—Jeremy Taylor
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse. He will go to any length for it-risk fortune, character, reputation, life itself.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Oh Doris Lessing, my dear—your Anna is wrong about orgasms. They are no proof of love—any more than that other Anna’s fall under the wheels of that Russian train was a proof of love. It’s all female shenanigans, cultural mishegoss, conditioning, brainwashing, male mythologizing. What does a woman want? She wants what she has been told she ought to want. Anna Wulf wants orgasm, Anna Karenina, death. Orgasm is no proof of anything. Orgasm is proof of orgasm. Someday every woman will have orgasms—like every family has color TV—and we can all get on with the real business of life.
—Erica Jong (b.1942) American Novelist, Feminist
Because her instinct has told her, or because she has been reliably informed, the faded virgin knows that the supreme joys are not for her; she knows by a process of the intellect; but she can feel her deprivation no more than the young mother can feel the hardship of the virgin’s lot.
—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931) British Novelist, Playwright, Critic
We do not go to bed in single pairs; even if we choose not to refer to them, we still drag there with us the cultural impedimenta of our social class, our parents lives, our bank balances, our sexual and emotional expectations, our whole biographies—all the bits and pieces of our unique existences.
—Angela Carter (1940–92) English Novelist
The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.
—Heywood Hale Broun (1918–2001) American Journalist, Commentator, Actor
It is illegal in England to state in print that a wife can and should derive sexual pleasure from intercourse
—Bertrand A. Russell (1872–1970) British Philosopher, Mathematician, Social Critic
There is the pleasurable orgasm, like a rising sales graph, and there is the unpleasurable orgasm, slumping ominously like the Dow Jones in 1929.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
When a guy goes to a hooker, he’s not paying her for sex, he’s paying her to leave.
—Unknown
Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex.
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British Sexologist, Physician, Social Reformer
Sex is more exciting on the screen and between the pages than between the sheets.
—Andy Warhol (1928–87) American Painter, Printmaker, Film Personality
Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or how long it is going to last.
—Anonymous