If you’ve read my page On Nudity and Naturism you should not go away with the impression I’m ploughing a lone furrow. So here are a few quotes from others – some great and good; others ordinary – on the benefits of nudity. (Attributions are given where known.)
A Nudist is simply a human being without ‘Artificial Additives’!
I like me better naked. I don’t mean that in a vain way … When you put clothes on, you immediately put a character on. Clothes are adjectives, they are indicators. When you don’t have any clothes on, it’s just you, raw, and you can’t hide.
Padma Lakshmi; quoted at Clothes Free Life
Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions, and the only one.
Montaigne (1533-1593)
Nudity is a state of fact; lewdity, to coin a phrase, is a state of mind.
Paul Outerbridge
I think the key to acceptance of social nudity is in seeing people doings things clothes free you might ordinarily do clothed.
Being naked is natural and beautiful.
What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful that the garment with which it is clothed?
Michelangelo
If we were meant to be nude, we would have been born that way.
Oscar Wilde
Sure, some people might believe they are offended by nude bathers, but, if you never encounter anything that offends you in your community, you are not living in a free society.
Forcing Americans to always wear clothing while swimming or sunbathing even in designated or secluded areas is as bad as forcing women to always wear burkhas.
Corky Stanton
I was born naked and I’m going to die naked so I don’t see anything wrong with it.
Justin Timberlake
Some day people will grow up and realize that the only thing vile about human bodies is the small minds some people have developed within them.
Dick Hein
I come from a country where you don’t wear clothes most of the year. Nudity is the most natural state. I was born nude and I hope to be buried nude.
Elle MacPherson
The girl with dark hair was coming towards him across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With all its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole [oppressive] culture, a whole system of thought.
George Orwell; 1984
The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex.
Lord Bertrand Russell; Marriage and Morals; 1929
Take off your shoes and feel the grass beneath your feet. Then take off your clothes and feel the sun and the air and the world.
Barry Knell
Warning: Clothing has been shown to cause extreme psychological dependence. Wear it at your own risk.
Ben Thornton
The best thing to do would be to designate everywhere as clothing optional, and we could leave little fenced in areas for the prudes to prance around in. Call them “Prudist Camps”. They could peer out of their fences and indulge in their offensive “I’m offended” behaviour whenever they saw a natural person walk by, without bothering the rest of us.
Why would anyone want to teach their children their bodies are disgusting, unacceptable and offensive to even look at? Why would anyone want to teach their children self shame, self disgust and to despise their body or any one else’s body?
Because naturists don’t think of sex when they undress, because naturists don’t think of sex when they are engaged in wholesome family activities. Because naturists don’t grab a towel for cover, after taking a shower in fear of having others view them in a ‘sex obsessed’ manner? Who are the perverts then?
A child who has never been allowed to see his parents and brothers and sisters naked sees nudity as something shocking.
Dr Helga Fleischhauer-Hardt
I am not a naturist, a nudist, a streaker, nor an exhibitionist. Labels are for clothes. My unclothed appearance is also not motivated sexually nor out of any gratuitous need to seek attention. I believe that while society continues to have a fundamentally negative relationship with the human body and appearance, we can never be a free or mature society. It’s the 21st century. Time to evolve.
Russell Higgs
Is not nakedness indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent.
Walt Whitman
The main hangup in the world today is hypocrisy and insecurity. If people can’t face up to the fact of other people being naked, or whatever they want to do, then we’re never going to get anywhere. People have got to become aware that it’s none of their business and that being nude is not obscene. Being ourselves is what’s important. If everyone practised being themselves instead of pretending to be what they aren’t, there would be peace.
John Lennon
There’s something therapeutic about nudity. Clothing is one of the external things about a character. Take away the Gucci or Levis and we’re all the same.
Kevin Bacon
If women don’t want to be ogled, they should just get naked; nothing can possibly deflate voyeurism better … Once the element of “tease” is gone, the voyeur must turn elsewhere.
Jim C Cunningham
In fact, research suggests that children who have seen their parents nude do not grow up to be emotionally scarred, but instead are more likely to be accepting of their own bodies and comfortable with their own sexuality.
Holly Robinson; quoted on parents.com
It’s the invention of clothes, not nature, that made “private parts” private.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy, you may find in them a harness and a chain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment.
Khalil Gibran; The Prophet
The fear that seeing naked people in some way harms children is not supported, however, by academic research. The small handful of studies on this topic in psychology and sociology have shown, instead, that children reared in an atmosphere containing family social nudity may benefit from the practice.
Mark Storey; Children, Social Nudity and Scholarly Study
My parents were free about nudity, and we are too. I’d like our children to feel unashamed of whatever shape they are. People should worry about other things.
Heidi Klum; In Style; September 2007
The body is meant to be seen, not all covered up.
Marilyn Monroe
The last irrational, moralistic taboo in America is that of public nudity. There is no difference between an Iranian woman being arrested for going out in the streets without her hair covered and an American woman being arrested for stepping out her front door without a top on. Nobody can give a rational explanation for anti-nudity laws. The government uses, instead, abstract terminology like “disturbing the peace” or “public indecency”. Without realizing it, we criminalize nudity on strictly moral grounds, based on ancient and outdated religious biases that have no place in a modern society.
Nick Alimonos; Nudity is the Future
I reject the notion that men and women cannot live in sight of one another without clothes. I reject the belief that bodies are inherently sexual and must be hidden from view. And I know, with certainty, that nudity is not harmful to children – in fact, quite the opposite is true – shaming our kids, making them believe that their bodies are sinful, harms their self-esteem and their sense of identity.
Nick Alimonos; Naturism
The human body is not in itself shameful, nor for the same reasons are sensual reactions, and human sensuality in general. Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person.
Karol Cardinal Wojtyla (later to become Pope John Paul II)
Craftiness must have clothes, but truth loves to go naked.
English Proverb
[Sunbathing nude] was a liberating experience. It felt unbelievably crazy to take off all my clothes and play in the sun. I’ve not had that much fun in so long.
Amy Grant
I grew up walking around naked in my house. My mom was like that, and my sisters.
Jennifer Lopez
The Puritan often will brood
On how horrid it is to be nude;
The absence of clothing
He views with such loathing
That the naked truth strikes him as lewd.
DR Benson
Why would you wear a bathing suit? Does it keep you dry? Does it keep you warm? It’ s no kind of protection from sand. I can look at anyone and know what they look like under their clothes.
Stéphane Duschénes, President of the Federation of Canadian Naturists
[M]y children are being brought up in such a way that they don’t bat an eye at looking at anybody’s nakedness. They look at the so-called private parts the same way they look at an elbow or an ear. I think that’s entirely psychologically healthy. When they look at a person, they see the whole person, not the parts, like ordinary society does.
Jim C Cunningham
Those who have never worked nude outdoors just can’t imagine how much better a breeze feels on their skin than an item of sweaty clothing.
Ben Miller
If it’s good for ancient Druids, runnin’ nekkid through the wuids, Drinkin’ strange fermented fluids, it’s good enough for me!
Pete Seeger [singing about mead]
We say ‘nakedness is natural’, but have we begun to think through all that means? It is so basic. A human being is an innocent part of nature. Our civilization has distorted this universal quality that allows us to feel at home in our skin. Other animals have coats that they accept, but the human race has yet to come to terms with being nude.
Ruth Bernhard
We are so narrow minded that we show war, murder, and rape on TV, but we are not allowed to show one of the most wonderful creations (the human body) in its natural form.
Mario Roman
Being natural and matter-of-fact about nudity prevents your children from developing an attitude of shame or disgust about the human body. If parents are very secretive about their bodies and go to great lengths to prevent their children from ever seeing a buttock or breast, children will wonder what is so unusual, and even alarming, about human nudity.
Dr Lee Salk, psychiatrist
© Copyright Keith C Marshall, 2018. All rights reserved.
Last updated: 30 April 2018, Keith Marshall