Quotes - copied with kind permision of Halcyon Naturist Swim

• Nudity is a state of fact; lewdity, to coin a phrase, is a state of mind – Paul Outerbridge, Jr. Photographer
• Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue – John Kenneth Galbraith, US Economist, 1908-2006
• Just because I’m naked doesn’t mean you have to be – Richard Foley, Developer, Enthusiastic Naked Hiker and Author – 2005
• The point is NOT that one must be naked, but that one CAN be naked, and in any context – Richard Foley, Developer, Enthusiastic Naked Hiker and Author – 2005
• Furthermore, because God created it, “The human body can remain nude and uncovered and preserve its splendour and its beauty.” – Pope John Paul II
• Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes – Mark Twain
• I am a bit of a naturist at heart – Robbie Williams
• “We find that relaxing with clothes off at Elysium Fields [Naturist Resort] is a great tension reliever, for ourselves and our kids too.”
  Lynn Redgrave, actress
• “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 smoking pot, 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 practiced being themselves instead of pretending to be what they aren’t, there would be peace.” – John Lennon
• Don’t arrest me I was born this way – seen on a the body of a Naked Mile participant
• I wasn’t really naked. I simply didn’t have any clothes on – Josephine Baker, Actress, 1906-1975
• It is an interesting question how far people would retain their relative rank if they were divested of their clothes – Henry David Thoreau, Author, 1817-1862
• The best dress for walking is nakedness – Colin Fletcher – the Complete Walker
• 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 than the garment with which it is clothed? – Michaelangelo, Artist, 1475-1564
• The taboo against nakedness is an obstacle to a decent attitude on the subject of sex. – Lord Bertrand Russell – Marriage and Morals – 1929
• There are those who so dislike the nude that they find something indecent in the naked truth – F H Bradley, Philosopher, 1846-1924
• On the fourth day of telecommuting, I realized that clothes are totally unnecessary – Dilbert
• “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, Australian model and actress
• In a democracy it is necessary that people should learn to endure having their sentiments outraged … – Lord Bertrand Russell – letter to the Times Newspaper 1940
• If man were meant to be naked, he would have been born naked – Oscar Wilde
• “To be offended by the visual appearance of another person is prejudice, akin to racism. The right to exist, uncovered, should hold precedence over the right not to view this, for the objection is irrational.” – said naked activist Terri Webb.
• “Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is mere populism.” – John Updike, Novelist, 1932-2009
• Nudism is not a spectator sport. We all have the equipment and everyone can play. – Jim C. Cunningham, NLI
• “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
• Wearing clothes is like blindfolding the skin – you can’t feel the world around you as you should. Barry Knell 9^th May 2009
• 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 9^th May 2009
• Warning: Clothing has been shown to cause extreme psychological dependence. Wear it at your own risk….. said Ben Thornton
• The finest clothing made is a person’s skin, but, of course, society demands something more than this.  -Mark Twain
• I simply can’t understand
  Why swimsuits are in such demand
  They’re soggy and damp,
  Bind like a clamp,
  And hold about three pounds of sand!
  -D.R. Benson
• The first purpose of clothes… was not warmth or decency, but ornament…. Among wild people, we find tattooing and painting even prior to clothes.  The first spiritual want of a barbarous man is decoration; as indeed we still see among the barbarous classes in civilized countries. – Thomas Carlyle, writer, 1795-1881
• All dress is fancy dress, is it not, except our natural skins?  – George Bernard Shaw, playwright 1856-1950
• When I free my body from its clothes, from all their buttons, belts, and laces, it seems to me that my soul takes a deeper, freer breath. – August Strindberg, playwright, 1849-1912
• Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?  – Roland Barthes, Philosopher, 1915-1980
• How idiotic civilization is!  Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?  ~Katherine Mansfield, writer, 1888-1923, Bliss and Other Stories
• Man is the sole animal whose nudity offends his own companions, and the only one who, in his natural actions, withdraws and hides himself from his own kind.  – Montaigne, writer, 1533-1592

• “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 – Founder ClothesFree International.
• “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.” – Corky Stanton – Founder ClothesFree International.
• In Style magazine, Kevin Bacon confesses he likes to cut a little footloose at home with his family every now and then — naked. “Not when the nanny is around,” he says. “But I will with my wife and kids.” Why? “There’s something therapeutic about nudity … Take away the Gucci or Levi’s and we’re all the same.”
• “I didn’t grow up with a mother telling me what was under my clothes was bad or evil.” – Charlize Theron
• Fig leaves belong on trees, not people. – Corky Stanton

• Justin Timberlake wants to strip off on a nudist beach after spotting one in France. He said, “I was born naked and I’m going to die naked so I don’t see anything wrong with it.”

• “Don’t let those who have body negative values define what is and what is not acceptable. Seize your freedom and restore your dignity!” – BodyFreedom.org
• “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.” – Anonymous
• “I like it here. When I go to the other swimming pools they all look at my legs. When I come here they look at me.” – 12 year old girl with Cerebral Palsy concerning a naturist swim
• Body shame, like prejudice, is not natural. It is learned from others and benefits no one.
• “I’d go somewhere where no one spoke. I would take a stack of books up to my hips, and I’d read nonstop. And I’d be reading naked.” – Linda Hamilton (actress), on what she’d do with a day to herself.
• Bathing led to nudity. Nudity led to promiscuity. So believed the colonial lawmakers of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Philadelphia was especially strict in those early years. You could be jailed there bathing more than once a month.
• Forcing others to wear clothes because we cannot control our own lust, is abuse of others.
• Is it normal for us keep to our bodies covered in cloth 100% of the time? For some people, walking from the bathroom to the bedroom with no towel handy will cause them extreme panic and stress. Is this healthy? Being naked should just be another form of dress, nothing more, nothing less.
• “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
• “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, Australian model and actress.
• 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? Why would anyone set a bad example to their children by having a prejudicial bigotry against another group of people?
• Despite its puritan roots, the U.S. has a long history of skinny-dipping. Social nudity is celebrated in the writings of Walt Whitman and the landscape paintings of Thomas Eakins. Benjamin Franklin took a daily naked “air bath,” while presidents John Quincy Adams, Theodore Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson enjoyed a refreshing nude dip. According to National Geographic Magazine, John Quincy Adams (1825-29), the sixth President, customarily took a nude early morning swim in the Potomac River. See National Geographic
• A Nudist is simply a human being without ‘Artificial Additives’!
• 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?
• “Clothes make the man, but nakedness makes the human being.” – Kevin Kearney
• “I just love having no clothes on outside, and the only time to do that is when the sun’s shining. It’s a wonderful sensation to not have any clothes on.” – P.J. Harvey, singer.
• “Clothes therefore, must be the insignia of the superiority of man over all other animals, for surely there could be no other reason for wearing the hideous things.” – From Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Walk Nude, and people won’t need to undress you with their eyes.
• “Are we so narrow minded that we show war, murder, rape, etc. on TV, but we do not allow to show one of the most wonderful creations (the human body) in its natural form.” – Mario Roman
• I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience. –Shelley Winters
• How is it possible for the human body, which was created in the image of god, to be offensive to anybody? Satan would love to see God’s greatest creation be considered offensive.
• Many come to bring their clothes to church rather than themselves. –Thomas Fuller
• “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
• When wearing only a smile – be sure to smile a lot.
• If possible, compute in the nude. – From the book “Supercharging MS-Dos” by Microsoft Press, 3rd Ed., pg. 393, under the section “Static Electricity Is A Killer”
• 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 – naked activist

• “Nakedness means freedom, and although dancing on a sun-kissed hillside with shorts on seems pretty similar to dancing with shorts off, there is all the difference in the world. It is as if your clothes take on the weight of your worries and concerns – they come to embody your defences against the world, and if you can feel confident enough and safe enough, then taking them off evokes a powerful sense of liberation, of joy and freedom; and more than that – of innocence and of openness to the world.”
  Philip Carr-Gomm, ‘The Druid Way’

• “With a little inner pirouette of excitement I realised just how much there was to look forward to tomorrow. The thought of being all day naked in the sun was delicious enough in itself, but there was the whole of our new world to explore.”
  Lucy Irvine, Castaway

• “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
• “Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! –ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is–nor what faith or art or health really is.”
Walt Whitman, Specimen Days
• “Sometimes I like to run naked in the moonlight and the wind, on a little trail behind out house, when the honeysuckle blooms. It’s a feeling of freedom, so close to God and nature.”
  Dolly Parton
• “To be naked is to be oneself.”
  John Berger, ‘Ways of Seeing’
• “The Britons (say historians) were naked, civilized men, learned, studious, abstruse in thought and contemplation; naked, simple, plain in their acts and manners; wiser than after ages…”William Blake, in a review of his own lost picture ‘The Ancient Britons’
• “We have come into the world naked, and all the animals are naked, why should man hide his body behind clothes?”
Osho
• “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
• “Human beings to me are as much a part of nature as trees or birds, and the unclothed body expresses this belongingness directly and powerfully.”
  Wynn Bullock
• “To some, the freedom to be naked if you want may seem a frivolous issue to explore in any depth during our perilous times. But these are rarified times times as well, a time when all things are coming to light.”
Stuart Ward
• “The freest people I know are those who have the least to hide, defend or protect. Naked is powerful.”
  Alan Cohen
• “What a singular fact for an angel visitant to this earth to carry back in his note-book, that men were forbidden to expose their bodies under the severest penalties!”
  Henry David Thoreau, Journals
• “For someone to tell me – especially the government – that I have to wear clothes, they’re telling me that I have to be ashamed of myself. Government is mandating that people shame themselves.”
  Dan Speers
• “The body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.”
  John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club
• “Naturism offers a way of being that dares to suggest that who we are without any additions or covering up is all we need to be.”
  Philip Carr-Gomm
• “Be glad, my merry friends, and let the warm sunlight heat now heart and limb! Cast off these cold rags! Run naked on the grass, while Tom goes a-hunting!”
  Tom Bombadil in J.R.R.Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’
• “I like to run down to the beach and have a little swim in the nude in the morning.”
  former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
• “The church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.”
  Eduardo Galeano, “Windows on the World”
• “Complete nudity in itself is not erotic. It becomes so only when preceeded by or contrasted to a state of dress. In this limited context then, all clothes become somewhat immoral, if we define immorality as inciting sexual interest. Habitual nakedness may indeed be capable of elevating man to a higher mental plane…”
  Dr. Marylnn J. Horn, “The Second Skin: An Interdisciplinary Study of Clothing”
• “Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence.”
  Thomas Paine, “Common Sense”
• I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked, : I am mad for it to be in contact with me.
  – Walt Whitman: From Song of Myself (1855)
• “Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! –ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating ecstasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is–nor what faith or art or health really is.” – Walt Whitman, Specimen Day
• “My favorite thing is to be naked, which is why I always live in remote areas. My ideal is to wake in the morning and run around the meadows naked. I think it’s a good idea to live in harmony with nature.” – Daryl Hannah
• Brad Pitt was asked if he enjoyed starring as the half-naked Greek demi-god Achilles in the film Troy. Pitt said, “I’m naked all the time at home.”
• “I’m a naturist at heart,” she says, “I love being on beaches where everyone is naked. Ugly young people, beautiful old people, whatever. It’s so unsexual and so liberating…” Dame Helen Mirren.

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