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
Sex can be fun after eighty, after ninety, and after lunch!
—George Burns (1896–1996) American Comedian
Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes.
—Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (1929–94 ) American First Lady
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
Sex is like snow; you never know how many inches you are going to get or how long it is going to last.
—Anonymous
Sex is as important as eating or drinking and we ought to allow the one appetite to be satisfied with as little restraint or false modesty as the other.
—Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) French Political leader, Revolutionary, Novelist, Poet, Critic
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
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
As I grow older and older
And totter towards the tomb,
I find I care less and less
Who goes to bed with whom.
—Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) British Crime Writer
I know nothing about sex, because I was always married.
—Zsa Zsa Gabor (1919–2016) Hungarian-born Film Actress
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
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
—Anatole France (1844–1924) French Novelist
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
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
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
I have urged on woman independence of man, not that I do not think the sexes mutually needed by one another, but because in woman this fact has led to an excessive devotion, which has cooled love, degraded marriage and prevented it her sex from being what it should be to itself or the other. I wish woman to live, first for God’s sake. Then she will not take what is not fit for her from a sense of weakness and poverty. Then if she finds what she needs in man embodied, she will know how to love and be worthy of being loved.
—Margaret Fuller (1810–50) American Feminist, Writer, Revolutionary
When a guy goes to a hooker, he’s not paying her for sex, he’s paying her to leave.
—Unknown
There is nothing safe about sex. There never will be.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
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
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
Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.
—Margaret Mead (1901–78) American Anthropologist, Social Psychologist
Sex. In America an obsession. In other parts of the world a fact.
—Marlene Dietrich (1901–92) German-born American Actor, Singer
Electric flesh-arrows… traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm.
—Anais Nin (1903–77) French-American Essayist
Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go it’s one of the best.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Sex: the pleasure is momentary, the position ridiculous, and the expense damnable.
—Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773) English Statesman, Man of Letters
There is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror.
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965) British Novelist, Short-Story Writer, Playwright
Every man has been brought up with the idea that decent women don’t pop in and out of bed; he has always been told by his mother that “nice girls don’t.” He finds, of course, when he gets older that this may be untrue—but only in a certain section of society.
—Barbara Cartland (1901–2000) English Popular Romantic Novelist
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
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
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
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
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
Sex is like having dinner: sometimes you joke about the dishes, sometimes you take the meal seriously.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
There goes a saying, and ’twas shrewdly said, “Old fish at table, but young flesh in bed.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744) English Poet
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
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 appeal is fifty percent what you’ve got and fifty percent what people think you’ve got.
—Sophia Loren (b.1934) Italian Actor
Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) English Journalist, Author, Media Personality, Satirist
Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.
—Mark Twain (1835–1910) American Humorist
Admittedly, a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo—and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way.
—William S. Burroughs (1914–97) American Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Painter
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
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 is better than talk…Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.
—Woody Allen (b.1935) American Film Actor, Director
Sex at age ninety is like trying to shoot pool with a rope.
—George Burns (1896–1996) American Comedian
Sex appeal is the keynote of our civilization
—Henri Bergson (1859–1941) French Philosopher, Evolutionist
A woman is handicapped by her sex, and handicaps society, either by slavishly copying the pattern of man’s advance in the professions, or by refusing to compete with man at all.
—Betty Friedan (1921–2006) American Feminist Author, Lecturer
The sexual embrace can only be compared with music and with prayer.
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British Sexologist, Physician, Social Reformer
At the heart of pornography is sexuality haunted by its own disappearance
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
You can get everything money will buy without a lick of character, but you can’t get any of the things money won’t buy: happiness, joy, peace of mind, winning relationships, etc., without character.
—Zig Ziglar (1926–2012) American Author
No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.
—Gloria Steinem (b.1934) American Feminist, Journalist, Social Activist, Political Activist