Hugh Hefner Quotes That Are playboy, iconic and visionary

Living in the moment, thinking about the future, and staying connected to the past: That's what makes me feel whole.

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.

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

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

My best pick-up line is "My name is Hugh Hefner."

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

Sex is the driving force on the planet. We should embrace it, not see it as the enemy.

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

I would like to think that I will be remembered as someone who had some positive impact on the sociosexual values of his time. And I think I'm secure and happy in that.

The interesting thing is how one guy, through living out his own fantasies, is living out the fantasies of so many other people.

It's good to be selfish. But not so self-centered that you never listen to other people. Hugh Hefner Legacy

My life is an open book. With illustrations.

Life is bittersweet. Inside our heads, if we're lucky, we're the same kids as we were when we were young.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Part of the sexual revolution is bringing rationality to sexuality.

Because when you don't embrace sexuality in a normal way, you get the twisted kinds, and the kinds that destroy lives.

I urge one and all to live this life as if there is no reward in the afterlife and to do it in a moral way that makes it better for you and for those around you, and that leaves this world a little better place than when you found it.

There are many roads to Mecca.

Picasso had his pink period and his blue period. I am in my blonde period right now.

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

What surprises me about getting older is that I remain so young.

Loneliness doesn't have much to do with where you are.

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.

You stay in touch with the boy who dreamed impossible dreams.

One of the problems with organized religion is that it has always kept women in a second-class position. They have been viewed as the daughters of Eve.

I think the Playboy philosophy is very, very connected to the American dream.

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 think that there's nothing wrong with masturbation. If you're not feeling good about your own sexuality and your own body, you're not going to feel good about anything else.

You know, from my point of view, I'm the luckiest cat on the planet.

It is the beauty of women, and the fact that they are the focus, that they are sex objects in a positive sense, is the reason we have civilization.

The Puritans thought they could simply repress man's sexual nature, and they reaped a whirlwind as a result. Their code of sexual morality - which became America's - was nothing more than a set of rules laid down by people who believed that all pleasure was suspect.

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

It's women who have embraced their own sexuality, it's why women wear makeup, it's why they wear high heels. It's what civilization is all about.

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.

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."

My first wife was a brunette, and Barbi Benton, my major romantic relationship of the early 1970s, was a brunette. But since the end of my marriage, all of my girlfriends have been blonds.

I was raised in a truly typical Midwestern home with a lot of repression. My life, and the creation of Playboy, were a response to that repression.

Since time immemorial, youth has set the universal standard of physical beauty, and the reason is simply that a shapely firm young face and body are more attractive sexually and aesthetically than bulges, sags and wrinkles.

I truly believe that age - if you're healthy - age is just a number.

The whole 1950s notion was find the right girl, get married, move to the suburbs and then hang out with the guys while she stayed home with the babies. I felt that was sort of sad.

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.

I think that sexual oppression and dictatorship go hand in hand.

The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure.

Power has not corrupted me. I have not become jaded. I wake up every day well aware of my good fortune, loving the work I do, loving my life, realizing that life is a crapshoot and I'm on a roll second to none.