War is, after all, the universal perversion ... war stories, the pornography of war.
Where is the source of all money-sickness, and the origin of all sex-perversion?.... It lies in the heart of man, and not in the conditions.
Sex is front-page copy everywhere. [But] nothing can alter the fact that God calls perversion sin.
There is such a reluctance to address sex as an inherent part of the human experience in this country... The true perversion to me is crushing it and hiding it.
It is a terrible error to let any natural impulse, physical or mental, stagnate. Crush it out, if you will, and be done with it; or fulfil it, and get it out of the system; but do not allow it to remain there and putrefy. The suppression of the normal sex instinct, for example, is responsible for a thousand ills. In Puritan countries one inevitably finds a morbid preoccupation with sex coupled with every form of perversion and degeneracy.
If you had a daily printout from the brain of an average twenty-four-year-old male, it would probably go like this: sex, need coffee, sex, traffic, sex, sex, what an asshole, sex, ham sandwich, sex, sex, etc
The only real rival of love is Art, for that in itself is a deep personal passion, its function an act of creation, fed by some mysterious perversion of sex, and demanding all the imagination's activities.
In your thirties, you're much more comfortable with sex. First of all, sex is something you've done more. You know you can have sex just to have sex; you can have sex with friends; you can have sex with people you love; you can have sex with people you don't like, but the sex is good. And you can joke about sex much more.
War is elevating, because the individual disappears before the great conception of the state... What a perversion of morality to wish to abolish heroism among men!
Serial or sex murder, like fetishism, is a perversion of male intelligence. It is a criminal abstraction, masculine in its deranged egotism and orderliness. It is the asocial equivalent of philosophy, mathematics, and music. There is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.
If one accepts the 24th and 104th Psalms as scriptural norms, then surface mining and other forms of earth destruction are perversions. If we take the Gospels seriously, how can we not see industrial warfare - with its inevitable massacre of innocents - as a most shocking perversion? By the standard of all scriptures, neglect of the poor, of widows and orphans, of the sick, the homeless, the insane, is an abominable perversion.
I consider that sex is part of life as much as architecture, fashion, art or food. Sex is life, simple. And I refuse to consider that sex should be hidden. When you hide sex, problems start because sex becomes dangerous.
War to me is very much like sex. You can develop a theory that says sex is primarily for the exchange of genetic material, or that it's a celebration of life, or you can make up 50,000 theories about why human beings have sex, all of which are in some sense true, all of which by themselves miss the point. Because the answer is extraordinarily complex. It may be for fun, it may be for reproduction, for financial reasons, any number of things.
In other words, homosexuality was no longer to be considered an illegal form of debauchery or perversion in which one willingly engaged a person of his own sex, but a mental illness which one blamed on his mother. Consequently, a homosexual is not responsible for his behavior - it's his mother's fault!
For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.
I was groomed as a so-called sex symbol, a rival to Marilyn Monroe, and from then on, whenever my picture appeared in paper, it was 'sex kitten,' 'sex symbol,' 'sex goddess,' 'sex pot.' I've accepted it, and I'm flattered, but in some ways, it's been a hindrance to me because I haven't been able to be taken seriously as an actress.