Hugh Hefner Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

Women have traditionally been either put on pedestals or damned as the source of all sexual temptation and sin. These are two sides of the same coin, since both place women in a nonhuman role. Playboy has opposed these warped sexual values and, in so doing, helped women step down from their pedestals and enjoy their natural sexuality as much as men.

Hugh Hefner
I am a kid in the candy store. I dreamed impossible dreams. And the dreams turned out beyond anything I could possibly imagine. You know, from my point of view, I'm the luckiest cat on the planet.

Hugh Hefner
I believed that sex, when properly understood, could be the best of who we are. It doesn't mean that it can't be exploited or abused. It can be. But sex itself is the fire around which we warm ourselves. It is the heart of civilization and the family.

Hugh Hefner
If Playboy ever loses its editorial balls, then it will deserve to be knocked over by a younger, more vigorous magazine in the coming generation. But that won't happen so long as I'm alive, I can promise you that.

Hugh Hefner
One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

Hugh Hefner
If you don't encourage healthy sexual expression in public, you get unhealthy sexual expression in private. If you attempt to suppress sex in books, magazines, movies and even everyday conversation, you aren't helping to make sex more private, just more hidden. You're keeping sex in the dark. What we've tried to do is turn on the lights.

Hugh Hefner
To begin with, I fought racism, then sexism, now I'm fighting ageism. One defines oneself in one's own terms. If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

Hugh Hefner
Publishing a sophisticated men's magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I'd been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot.

Hugh Hefner
Did you know that I almost called the magazine Stag Party and the symbol was originally going to be a stag? I changed my mind just before we went to press, thank God. Somehow, it wouldn't have been the same. Can you imagine a chain of key clubs staffed by beautiful girls wearing antlers?

Hugh Hefner
Much of what Playboy is really all about is the projection of the adolescent fantasies I have never really lost. The boy has been father to the man.

Hugh Hefner
I think that retirement is the first step towards the grave.

Hugh Hefner
Of course, it is the nature of the beast to find the prude and the bigot most anxious to force his or her opinion of what is right on the rest of us. They often seem to have nothing better to do with themselves than worry about the affairs of their neighbors.

Hugh Hefner
The major civilizing force in the world is not religion, it's sex.

Hugh Hefner