Prohibition

"Forbidden to forbid".

A police raid at Elk Lake, in Canada, C.E.1925, and Blind pigs raided, and 160 kegs destroyed, in Elk Lake, in Ontario

Prohibition is the action or effect of prohibit, that is, "to prohibit or prevent the use or execution of something."

Quotes of Prohibition:

• Adam was simply a human being and that explains everything. He didn't want the apple for the apple's sake. He only wanted it because it was forbidden. The mistake was not to forbid him the snake, because then he would have eaten the snake. (Mark Twain)
• Making a law and not enforcing it is equivalent to authorizing the thing you want to prohibit. (Cardinal Richelieu)
• The doctors need little to heal you: as long as they can forbid you something, everything is fine. The cunning lies in having only the things you care about least prohibited. (Giovannino Guareschi)
• dogma is nothing more than an explicit prohibition on thinking. (Ludwig Feuerbach)
• The sacred is scary. But also the absence of him, even the desecrated world, without rules, without prohibitions. Free, we cannot exist. We must choose what consoles us most. (Guido Ceronetti)
• In the beginning, therefore, there was boredom, commonly called chaos. God, bored with boredom, created the earth, the sky, the water, the animals, the plants, Adam and Eve; the latter, becoming bored of paradise, ate the forbidden fruit. God got bored of them and kicked them out of Eden. (Alberto Moravia)
• The dangerous element of bans: that we trust them and do not reflect on when they should be changed. (Elias Canetti)
• ethics prohibits us from considering men as means and Man as an end. (Nicolás Gómez Dávila)
• Forbidden things make desire grow. (Luigi Alamanni)
• But the areas most frequented by the liberators were precisely those Off limits, that is, the most infected and therefore most forbidden, since it is the nature of man, especially of soldiers of all times and of any army, to prefer things prohibited than permitted. (Curzio Malaparte)
• There are no commandments, there are no prohibitions. There are no merits or demerits either; hell and heaven do not exist for followers of the Kula, or Goddess of the Heart. (Kulārṇava Tantra)
• Do not fear! Welcome the unknown and the unexpected and whatever else the event will bring you; abolish every prohibition; proceed safely and freely. Now have no concern other than to live. Your fate cannot be fulfilled except in the profusion of life. (Gabriele d'Annunzio)
• To show you where your desire is, just prohibit it a little (if it is true that there is no desire without prohibition). [...] On the one hand, I must be present as a prohibition (without which there would be no real desire), but I must also distance myself when, having formed the desire, my presence could inhibit it. (Roland Barthes)
• To make something noble, esteemable and loved, there is nothing better than persecuting it. (Riccardo Bacchelli)
• That secret is that you can't afford everything. An age in which everything goes has always made those who lived in it unhappy. Honesty, continence, chivalry, music, morality, poetry, form, prohibition, all this has no deeper purpose than to give life a limited and precise form. Happiness without limits does not exist. There is no great happiness without great prohibitions. Even in business you cannot chase any profit, otherwise you will achieve nothing. The border constitutes the mystery of the phenomenon, the secret of strength, luck, faith and the problem of supporting oneself, a microscopic man, in the boundless universe. (Robert Musil)
• If two people smoke under the "no smoking" sign you fine them, if twenty people smoke under the "no smoking" sign ask them to move, if two hundred people smoke under the "no smoking" sign remove the sign . (Winston Churchill)
• Stripped of ethnic rationalizations and philosophical claims, a crime is anything that those in charge prohibit. (Alfred Adler)
• We always strive for what is forbidden and crave what is denied to us. (Publius Ovidius Naso)

Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata.

• All forms of organized religion are socially similar in some respects. Each of them claims to be the sole guardian of the authentic truth. Each claims to speak as the supreme authority on all ethical questions. And each has requested, demanded, or ordered the State to sign up to its specific system of prohibitions. (Robert Anson Heinlein)
• [In Italy] Everything that is prohibited for public reasons can be done when it does not impede private interests. In carriages where smoking is prohibited, everyone smokes until one protests. (Giuseppe Prezzolini)
• A dangerous element of bans is that we trust them and do not think about when they should be changed. (Elias Canetti)

Italian proverbs:

• Whoever surrounds her garden with a hedge invites you to skip it.
• What is forbidden is most desired.
• Forbidden fruits are the sweetest.
• In sea willingly prohibited fishing.
• Stolen vinegar is sweeter than bought milk.
• What is most desired by us is what is most denied to us.
• What is permitted displeases, and what is forbidden pleases.

Bibliography:

• Annarosa Selene, Dizionario dei proverbs, Pan libri, C.E.2004. ISBN 8872171903

Related entries:

• Obligation