The freest people I know are those who have the least to hide, defend or protect. Naked is powerful. Alan Cohen
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
"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 that the garment with which it is clothed?" Michaelangelo
"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
"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 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
"Wearing nothing is divine. Naked is a state of mind. I take things off to clear my head, to say the things I haven`t said. I live inside my elements - the earth and sky are my best friends. Water is the evidence that washes me from end to end... first verse of track #1, "naked eye," on Luscious Jackson`s latest CD
"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue." John Kenneth Galbraith
"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
"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
"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
"Clothes make the man, but nakedness makes the human being." Kevin Kearney
"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
"His disciples asked, 'When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?' Jesus answered, 'When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then will you see the son of the Living One, and you will not be afraid.'" The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas
"We are so narrow minded that we show war, murder, and rape on TV, but we are not allowed to show one of the most wonderful creations (the human body) in its natural form." Mario Roman
"When you find a burden in belief or apparel, cast it off." Amelia Bloomer, 1850's proponent of women's equality and body acceptance
"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
"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
"Body shame, like prejudice, is not natural. It is learned from others and benefits no one." Anon
" Gymnophobia (from the Greek word for nude gymnos) is the fear of being (or seeing others) naked. A gymnophobic person usually wants to prevent others from experiencing the freedom of not wearing clothes." Anon
"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
"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." Anon
"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." Anon
"Humanity at present is illegal. Your human body is not allowed. It is suppressed because you are illegal - stop the oppression and legalize yourself. In reality, being human is not a crime." The Freedom to be Yourself campaign
"Not all the Greek runners in the original Olympics were totally naked. Some wore shoes." Mark Twain
"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"
"Being naked approaches being revolutionary; going barefoot is merely populism." John Updike
"My protests are human-rights oriented. It's not about sexual nudity or free love or taking drugs and jumping over fires in forests. If anything, it's spiritual. I just think you should have the right to walk down the street naked. I firmly believe that naked people should have equal rights with clothed people." Vincent Bethell
"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