Top 90 Hugh Hefner Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life is too short to be living somebody else’s dream.”

— Hugh Hefner

2. “If you let society and your peers define who you are, you’re the less for it.”

— Hugh Hefner

3. “My life is an open book. With illustrations.”

— Hugh Hefner

4. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

5. “I’m never going to grow up. Staying young is what it is all about for me.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

8. “It’s good to be selfish. But not so self-centered that you never listen to other people.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

10. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

11. “I am in very good health. I’ve never felt better.”

— Hugh Hefner

12. “We’re separated by our myths.”

— Hugh Hefner

13. “There are many roads to Mecca.”

— Hugh Hefner

14. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

15. “Publishing a sophisticated men’s magazine seemed to me the best possible way of fulfilling a dream I’d been nurturing ever since I was a teenager: to get laid a lot.”

— Hugh Hefner

16. “You know, from my point of view, I’m the luckiest cat on the planet.”

— Hugh Hefner

17. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

18. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

19. “I think that I am the luckiest cat on the planet and I’m living out my own dreams and fantasies and have been for a number of years and to remain at this stage of my life, you know, so alive and things have never been better.”

— Hugh Hefner

20. “I truly believe that age – if you’re healthy – age is just a number.”

— Hugh Hefner

21. “I am not primarily an entrepreneurial businessman. I’m primarily a playboy philosopher.”

— Hugh Hefner

22. “Several girlfriends are easier to handle than one wife.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

24. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

25. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

26. “Smoking helped put me in touch with the realm of the senses.”

— Hugh Hefner

27. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

28. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

29. “Life is bittersweet. Inside our heads, if we’re lucky, we’re the same kids as we were when we were young.”

— Hugh Hefner

30. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

31. “I think that sexual oppression and dictatorship go hand in hand.”

— Hugh Hefner

32. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

34. “Loneliness doesn’t have much to do with where you are.”

— Hugh Hefner

35. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

36. “I think that the major message of my life and what I hope to be remembered for is someone who managed to change the social sexual values of his time absolutely.”

— Hugh Hefner

37. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

38. “Retirement is unthinkable to me. The future is bright and very exciting and I’m looking forward to playing a part in it.”

— Hugh Hefner

39. “The people who had the most impact on me when I was young were Freud and Darwin, but growing up I also had my film idols.”

— Hugh Hefner

40. “People project their own dreams, fantasies, and prejudices onto my life. So people are either fans, or jealous, or disagree. Everybody marches to a different drummer.”

— Hugh Hefner

41. “You really don’t create an authoritarian society unless you control the personal choices including the sexual choices of the people.”

— Hugh Hefner

42. “They must be doing something right up there in Canada.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

44. “People get their information in different ways now. And we are a little poorer for it, because the way you get information affects what you learn.”

— Hugh Hefner

45. “I think that from the very beginning it wasn’t simply, what made Playboy so popular was not simply the naked ladies, what made the magazine so popular was, there was a point of view in the magazine, that you couldn’t run nude pictures without some kind of rational that they were art.”

— Hugh Hefner

46. “I got married before I found myself. People should find themselves before they get married.”

— Hugh Hefner

47. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

48. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner

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

— Hugh Hefner

50. “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.”

— Hugh Hefner