Selected Quotes
These are quotations related to prostitution which appear on Portal:Prostitution.
| “ | What is comes down to is this: the grocer, the butcher, the baker, the merchant, the landlord, the druggist, the liquor dealer, the policeman, the doctor, the city father and the politician – these are the people who make money out of prostitution, these are the real reapers of the wages of sin. | ” |
Polly Adler, A House is Not a Home (1953), Ch. 9.
| “ | Prostitution does injury to the dignity of the person who engages in it, reducing the person to an instrument of sexual pleasure. The one who pays sins gravely against himself: he violates the chastity to which his Baptism pledged him and defiles his body, the temple of the Holy Spirit. | ” |
Catechism of the Catholic Church 2355 by Pope John Paul II (1992)
| “ | On the evening of the last day of October, 1501, Cesare Borgia arranged a banquet in his chambers in the Vatican with "fifty honest prostitutes", called courtesans, who danced after dinner with the attendants and others who were present, at first in their garments, then naked. | ” |
Cesare Borgia's Diary, as quoted in Johann Burchard, Pope Alexander VI and His Court: Extracts from the Latin Diary of Johannes Burchardus, 1921, F.L. Glaser, ed., New York, N.L. Brown, pp. 154-155
| “ | Prostitutes are the inevitable product of a society that places ultimate importance on money, possessions, and competition. | ” |
Jane Fonda, in Thomas Kiernan, Jane: An Intimate Biography of Jane Fonda (1970).
| “ | I think it proves that if my business could be made legal, the way off-track betting is in New York, I and women like me could make a big contribution to what Mayor John Lindsay calls Fun City, and the city and state could derive the money in taxes and licensing fees that I pay off to crooked cops and political figures. | ” |
Xaviera Hollander, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story (2002), 253.
| “ | [in Kenya]...any woman who is single and has multiple male sex partners is considered to be a prostitute, whether or not money changes hands. | ” |
New Internationalist, Issue 252 - February 1994.
| “ | Egyptian law states that a man who is caught with a prostitute is not imprisoned; instead, his testimony is used to convict and imprison the prostitute. | ” |
New Internationalist, Issue 252 - February 1994.
| “ | Prostitution is not a monolith. The newspapers use the plight of the most vulnerable women to symbolize the entire field, ignoring the diversity of the sex-worker community. | ” |
Carol Leigh, quoted in: "Slick S.F. posters advocate decriminalizing prostitution" by Kevin Foley, San Francisco Chronicle, (August 14, 1995).
| “ | A prostitute was forgiven by Allah, because, passing by a panting dog near a well and seeing that the dog was about to die of thirst, she took off her shoe, and tying it with her head-cover she drew out some water for it. So, Allah forgave her because of that. | ” |
| “ | The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race. | ” |
Isabel Paterson, The God of the Machine (1943).