Javed Akhtar Quotes

Every group, every system has a set of values and morals and when you get outside those, then the alarms ring. I was politically incorrect to 95% of the country; luckily my 5% had the bread to come see me.

I don't know how one actually would define obscenity. I'm sure the definition is different according to the age one is living in.

I'm not sure I agree with the thesis, because I think that even though something grotesque or gross has been part of film since way back, what we accept or what we can get away with on the screen is broader now.

Right now I think censorship is necessary; the things they're doing and saying in films right now just shouldn't be allowed. There's no dignity anymore and I think that's very important.

The world is governed much more by opinion than by laws. It is not the judgment of courts, but the moral judgment of individuals and masses of men, which is the wall of defense around property and life.

What is morality in any given time or place? It is what the majority then and there happen to like, and immorality is what they dislike.

I guess I'm concerned that vulgarity has now officially entered the mainstream of our culture, and I think people have to respectfully stand up and say, 'No thanks.'

The CBFC is only mirroring society.

I love the fact we do break taboos.

One thing that N.W.A did, as Larry Flynt did before them, was to expand the boundaries of our reliance upon the good sense of the people to determine what's right and what isn't, what's obscene and what isn't, and what's immoral and what isn't.

Insights into erotic life belong to art, not education. But sometimes these have to be spelled out for the illiterates. And it ismainly a matter of convincing the illiterates, for they are the ones who write the penal code.

No writer in a free country should be expected to bother about the exact demarcation between the sensuous and the sensual; this is preposterous; I can only admire but cannot emulate the accuracy of judgment of those who pose the fair young mammals photographed in magazines where the general neckline is just low enough to provoke a past master's chuckle and just high enough not to make a postmaster frown.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

I simply loathe the crude 1960s distinctions between commerce and art. For me, Warhol and pop obliterated all of those separations - that was the whole point of the Brillo Boxes and Campbell's Soup Cans. And believe it or not, in 2009, moronic journalists are still saying to me, 'Your work is so commercial.'

Politics is chiefly a function of culture, at the heart of culture is morality, and at the heart of morality is religion.

Decency cannot be discussed without indecency!

In a perfect world, there would be no censorship, because there would be no judgement.

God has replaced sex as the unmentionable.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

At the end of the day, love is such a normal thing, and everyone deals with it. Just because it's a different lifestyle doesn't change the meaning of what I've been raised on, which is fairy tales.

Men of wit, learning and virtue might strike out every offensive or unbecoming passage from plays.

A great deal has been written about the forthrightness of the moderns shocking the Victorians, but there is no shock like the one which the forthrightness of the Victorians can give a modern.

I believe that while art is always beyond morality, it is never above it.

Sex and obscenity are not synonymous.

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.