Famous People And Their Thoughts On Nudity

Although famous people aren't always the brighest people (e.g., Britney Spears, John Murtha, George Clooney, etc.), they are indeed famous. This is from http://vanudist.home.att.net/famous_people_and_their_thoughts.htm.

"Sexual modesty cannot then in any simple way be identified with the use of clothing nor shamelessness with the absence of clothing and total or partial nakedness. There are circumstances in which nakedness is not immodest... Nakedness as such is not to be equated with physical shamelessness. Immodesty is present only when nakedness plays a negative role with regard to the value of the person... The human body is not in itself shameful, nor for the same reasons are sensual reactions, and human sensuality in general. Shamelessness (just like shame and modesty) is a function of the interior of a person."
Pope John Paul II (Karol Cardinal Wojtyla) Love & Responsibility, 1981

"Indecency, vulgarity, obscenity - these are strictly confined to man; he invented them. Among the higher animals there is no trace of them. They hide nothing. They are not ashamed."
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

"We are ashamed of everything that is real about us; ashamed of ourselves, of our relatives, of our incomes, of our accents, of our opinions, of our experience, just as we are ashamed of our naked skins."
George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

"Adam and Eve entered the world naked and unashamed - naked and pure-minded. And no descendant of theirs has ever entered it otherwise. All have entered it naked, unashamed, and clean in mind. They entered it modest. They had to acquire immodesty in the soiled mind, there was no other way to get it. ... The convention mis-called "modesty" has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone's whim - anyone's diseased caprice."
Mark Twain, Letters from the Earth

"There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium."
Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape

"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

"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

"This was life! Ah, how he loved it! Civilization held nothing like this in its narrow and circumscribed sphere, hemmed in by restrictions and conventionalities. Even clothes were a hindrance and a nuisance. At last he was free. He had not realized what a prisoner he had been."
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan of the Apes

"For a time Jack was angry; but when he had been without the jacket for a short while he began to realize that being half-clothed is infinitely more uncomfortable than being entirely naked. Soon he did not miss his clothing in the least, and from that he came to revel in the freedom of his unhampered state."
Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Son of Tarzan

"Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me... Nature was naked, and I was also... Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature! - ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness the 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, A Sun-bathed Nakedness

"The waves most washed me off the raft sometimes, but I hadn't any clothes on, and didn't mind."
Mark Twain, Huckelberry Finn

"If anything is sacred the human body is sacred."
Walt Whitman, I Sing The Body Electric

"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?"
Michelangelo

"Your clothes conceal much of your beauty, yet they hide not the unbeautiful. And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy, you may find in them a harness and a drain. Would that you could meet the sun and the wind with more of your body and less of your raiment."
Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

"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

"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

"It (sunning nude) was a liberating experience. It felt unbelievably crazy to take off all my clothes and play in the sun. I've not had that much fun in so long."
Amy Grant, Ladies Home Journal 12/1985

"Honestly, I walk around my house naked, ... I think the body's a beautiful thing and you should not hide yourself."
Britney Spears, Rolling Stone Magazine 09/2001

"The best dress for walking is nakedness."
Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker III

"I'm going to try and be as nude as possible from now on – as soon as I took my clothes off, everyone went: 'That guy is a good actor.' "
Marcus Graham - The Sunday Telegraph (Australia) May 25, 2003

"Everyone can be nude – it's not actually that hard. It's just a matter of relaxing. I feel pretty passé about the whole nude thing. I really couldn't care less."
Marcus Graham - The Sunday Telegraph (Australia) May 25, 2003

"I grew up walking around naked in my house. My mom was like that, and my sisters."
Jennifer Lopez - New York Daily News, July 8, 2003