Best 137 quotes of Hugh Hefner on MyQuotes

After all the Puritans came to America to escape from persecution and then turned around and started persecuting other people. So I understand that conflict that we have related to play and pleasure and sexuality. And I think what has made my life worthwhile is trying to deal with some of those questions.

After my stroke I put down much of the luggage of my life. I didn't have to prove anything anymore - in business, in my personal life or whatever. And now, as I work on my autobiography, I enjoy looking back, seeing the connections, the causes and effects of my life.

After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.

Americans are fascinated by our sexuality and frightened by it. And during the Reagan and Bush era you got an entire decade of anti-sex government. Sex is not the enemy. It is the beginning of civilization, family and tribe. Sex can be twisted and exploited, but in its most essential form, it's the best part of who we are. And it frightens us.

As Ray Bradbury - a longtime contributor to Playboy - said a long time ago, a lot of people, when they're talking about the contents of the magazine, they don't see the forest. People don't see the other part of my life because they're too fascinated with the girls.

At a very early age I started a cartoon scrapbook, actually when I was in high school. And it became, in turn, a scrapbook of my life. And there are about 2,000 volumes.

Beauty is everywhere - on the campus, in the office, living next door... Nice girls like sex too - it's a natural part of life. Don't be ashamed of it.

Because of the nature of my life, it's difficult for people to recognize that a person can live a full life, and maybe an unorthodox life, and still be on the side of the angels.

Being attacked by right-wing Christians did not bother me. Being attacked by liberal feminists did.

Could I be in a better place and happier than I am today? I don't think so.

Creating my own world in a comic or selling my first penny newspaper aged nine was a way of gaining recognition and acceptance by my peers.

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?

Everybody marches to a different drummer.

Follow your own particular dreams. We are handed a life by peers, parents and society, you can do that or follow your own dreams. Life is short, be a dreamer but be a practical person.

For me, the magazine was always the heart of what my life was all about, and the other half was living the life.

For some people, there is no succession plan. They just leave, and there's no getting over it.

Historically the Puritans left England to escape religious persecution, and they promptly turned around and started persecuting the people they didn't agree with - the scarlet letter A, and the stocks and the dunking board came from that. That puritanism is still there.

I always say now that I'm in my blonde years. Because since the end of my marriage, all of my girlfriends have been blonde.

I always think, quite frankly that pop culture is a lot more important than a lot of people realize.

I am in very good health. I've never felt better.

I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I'm primarily a playboy philosopher.

I can remember in my adolescence feeling that many of the things that were hurtful and hypocritical in society were things related to sex. They included the kind of censorship laws that existed in the movies and books when I was young.

I didn't want to repeat my parents life. I saw in their lives a routine and a lack of dreaming, a lack of the possibilities, a lack of passion. And I didn't want to live without passion.

I don't have dinner parties - I eat my dinner in bed.

I do think the reality is, there is a general recognition of what I've accomplished.

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.

I feel saddened when people who have major friendships or marriages wind up on the outs. Because I think you lose a little piece of yourself.

I felt quite frankly having been raised during the depression and looking back at the roaring twenties, the jazz age, which was a very magic timer in my mind because it was something that I had missed.

If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society, then the reverse was wrong, too.

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.

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.

If you let society and your peers define who you are, you're the less for it.

I guess I'm the most successful man I know. I wouldn't trade places with anybody in the world.

I guess you could say, I'm just a typical Methodist kid at heart.

I had a stroke in 1985... I called it a "stroke of luck." I said, "Life is like a train trip. You're looking out the window and everything is whipping past and you're not really seeing anything, and you need to get off the train and walk around a bit.

I have about 100 pairs of pajamas. I like to see people dressed comfortably.

I have been married twice, and those were not the happiest times of my life. Part of the problem, quite frankly, is that when you get married, the romance disappears and the children arrive and the love is transferred. It shouldn't be that way, but too often it is transferred to the children.

I have no plans to retire. It's the perfect combination of work and play that keeps you young. If I quit work it would be the beginning of the end for me.

I have very strong theories about magazine publishing. And I think that it is the most personal form of journalism. And I think that a magazine is an old friend.

I looked back on the roaring Twenties, with its jazz, 'Great Gatsby' and the pre-Code films as a party I had somehow managed to miss.

I'm never going to grow up. Staying young is what it is all about for me.

I'm not putting myself up as the epitome of virtue. I certainly am living a non-traditional life. But it is also a loving life and a very supportive one. I think that both in this, and the previous relationship, I think that I've been doing the best I can.

I'm very comfortable with the nature of life and death, and that we come to an end. What's most difficult to imagine is that those dreams and early yearnings and desires of childhood and adolescence will also disappear. But who knows? Maybe you become part of the eternal whatever.

In many ways, Im younger than I was 20 years ago.

In my own words, I played some significant part in changing the social-sexual values of our time. I had a lot of fun in the process.

In my wildest dreams, I could not have imagined a sweeter life.

In the '80s and '90s we started to have economic problems because society became more conservative. So we didn't have the wherewithal for expanding to other areas.

I remain very much connected to my childhood... I have never been too jaded or too sophisticated.

I suggested that sex was not the enemy, that violence was the enemy, that nice girls like sex.

It has been our experience that women usually prefer thin, undernourished, flatchested females, dressed to the teeth, as a concept of "feminine beauty" -- and that men prefer exactly the opposite: voluptuous, well-rounded and undressed. The women's idealization of woman is actually a male counterpart, competing with man in society; man's view of women is far more truly feminine.