Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred Kinsey

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American scientist Alfred Kinsey.

Last updated on November 8, 2024.

Alfred Charles Kinsey was an American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the Kinsey Reports, as well as the Kinsey scale. Kinsey's research on human sexuality, foundational to the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States as well as internationally.

American - Scientist | June 23, 1894 - August 25, 1956

Source: Wikipedia

We are the recorders and reporters of facts - not the judges of the behaviors we describe.

Alfred Kinsey

The only unnatural sex act is that which you cannot perform.

Alfred Kinsey

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white.

Alfred Kinsey

Few males achieve any real freedom in their sexual relations even with their wives. Few males realise how badly inhibited they are on these matters.

Alfred Kinsey

The range of variation in the female far exceeds the range of variation in the male.

Alfred Kinsey

Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes.

Alfred Kinsey

It is ordinarily said that criminal law is designed to protect property and to protect persons, and if society's only interest in controlling sex behavior were to protect persons, then the criminal codes concerned with assault and battery should provide adequate protection. The fact that there is a body of sex laws which is apart from the laws protecting persons is evidence of their distinct function, namely that of protecting custom.

Alfred Kinsey

The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity.

Alfred Kinsey

It is amazing to observe how many psychologists and psychiatrists have accepted this sort of propaganda, and have come to believe that homosexual males and females are discretely different from persons who respond to natural stimuli. Instead of using these terms as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may better be used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically responds.

Alfred Kinsey

If all persons with any trace of homosexual history, or those who were predominantly homosexual, were eliminated from the population today, there is no reason for believing that the incidence of the homosexual in the next generation would be materially reduced. The homosexual has been a significant part of human sexual activity since the dawn of history, primarily because it is an expression of capacities that are basic in the human animal.

Alfred Kinsey

The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species.

Alfred Kinsey

The male's difficulties in his sexual relations after marriage include a lack of facility, of ease, or of suavity in establishing rapport in a sexual situation.

Alfred Kinsey

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex.

Alfred Kinsey

The heterosexuality or homosexuality of many individuals is not an all-or-none proposition.

Alfred Kinsey

Cheese crumbs spread before a pair of copulating rats will distract the female but not the male.

Alfred Kinsey

Art alone develops weaklings, science alone, monsters. Somewhere, somehow, we must combine the two.

Alfred Kinsey

If biologists so often forget the most universal of all biologic principles [variation], it is not surprising that men and women in general expect their fellows to think and behave according to the pattern that may fit the law-maker, or the imaginary ideals for which the legislation was fashioned, but which are ill-shaped for all real individuals who try to live under them.

Alfred Kinsey

There is a tendency to consider anything in human behavior that is unusual, not well known, or not well understood, as neurotic, psychopathic, immature, perverse, or the expression of some other sort of psychologic disturbance.

Alfred Kinsey

Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Alfred Kinsey

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