Lgbt People

"On Philosophy Tube, I call all the shots, I do all the writing, I do all the research. I plan it all out, and it's my show. I miss the feeling of being at the bottom and having to climb up again."

"Art isn't a statement or a question. If it was, the artist would just write it down. Art isn't philosophy with pictures. It's art!"

"The nature of being raised in the way that I was, it's like, you get told you will be the future leaders of the world and then you get there and you find out the world is not enough."

"One of the advantages of facing the overwhelming, grief-like nature of climate change, is that once we realize it’s all one problem, we have a lot more allies than we thought. If you campaign for migrants’ freedom of movement, you are fighting climate change. If you support indigenous people’s rights to self-determination, if you support your local antifascists and people fighting police brutality, if you support demilitarization and nuclear disarmament… it’s all one planet."

"Security might never go back to the way it was. It can’t. The surveillance and the paranoia and the invasive measures can only ever expand, because it’s not actually grounded in any presently knowable facts about threat or safety. The whole game is about risk-managing the possible future, and since what might happen in the future is infinitely imaginable, the justification for more security becomes infinite too."

"Masculinity is a subject about which I know more than I should, but less than some of you may think. I studied it for a number of years but I never quite had the natural talent."

"What children, in fact all of us at any age, find frightening is unreliability and emotional coldness. The idea that you can't affect someone, that you can't see where they're coming from and can change tact at any moment."

"There's this myth in drama, which I think comes from theatre, and I think it comes from writers, who are too articulate for their own good, that everyone is sincere and able to communicate their ideas exactly at the moment that they are having their ideas. And it's not the way it is. And you can explore that in cinema. I tend to make friends with film-makers who are interested in inarticulacy."

"A practical observation that I’ve made over the years with ancient beloved people in my life—real spiritual youth is gained latterly."

"This is what happens: People quote back at you things that you said a very long time ago in some joking conversation with somebody, and they wrote it down and somebody else reads it back to you 10 years later."

"Haven't I made it obvious? Haven't I made it clear? Want me to spell it out for you? F-R-I-E-N-D-S Haven't I made it obvious? Haven't I made it clear? Want me to spell it out for you? F-R-I-E-N-D-S F-R-I-E-N-D-S"

"Dancing on the hood in the middle of the woods On an old Mustang, where we sang Songs with all our childhood friends And it went like this, say Oops, I got 99 problems singing bye, bye, bye Hold up, if you wanna go and take a ride with me Better hit me, baby, one more time, uh Paint a picture for you and me On the days when we were young, uh Singing at the top of both our lungs"

"Who the hell even asked for 5G????? Whatever you do. DO NOT GET 5G"

"I've never felt the need to tell anyone that I'm bisexual. I don't feel like I am. I just feel like I'm attracted to who I like. I honestly feel like everyone is like that."

"What I want to do in life is make people happy. Every day I wake up and say, ‘I’m going to make people smile."

"Absolutely. I love him. I loved him with all my heart, and I tried the best I could to make a deeply broken relationship work. And I couldn’t. I have no bad feelings or ill will toward him at all. I know that might be hard to understand or it might be really easy to understand, if you’ve ever loved anybody."

"I don't presume the average person should know those things. And so I don't take it personally. But even somebody who is sure I'm deserving of all this hate and vitriol, even if you think that I'm lying, you still couldn't look me in the eye and tell me that you think on social media there's been a fair representation."

"You cannot tell me that you think that this has been fair. I don’t blame them. I actually understand. He’s a beloved character and people feel they know him. He’s a fantastic actor."

"I use "pledge" and "donate" synonymous with one another. They are the same thing."

"I didn't punch you, by the way. (...) I didn't hit you across the face in a proper slap, but I was hitting you. I was not punching you."

"I was given a script, then given new versions of the script that had taken away scenes that had action in it, that depicted my character and another character — without giving any spoilers away — two characters fighting with one another. They basically took a bunch out of my role. They just removed a bunch."

"I don't label myself one way or another—I have had successful relationships with men and now a woman. I love who I love; it's the person that matters."

"I argue, then, that we might do well to attempt what is surely impossible—to withdraw our allegiance, however compulsory, from a reality based on the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism."

"Far from partaking of this narrative movement toward a viable political future, far from perpetuating the fantasy of meaning's eventual realization, the queer comes to figure the bar to every realization of futurity, the resistance, internal to the social, to every social structure or form."

"The various positivities produced ... by the logic of political hope depend on the mathematical illusion that negated negations might somehow escape, and not redouble, such negativity."

"In giving up an instinctive satisfaction, we simultaneously (1) internalize the authority presumably inhibiting the instinct, (2) increase our sense of guilt by intensifying our desire for satisfaction, (3) submit the ego to the fury of an aggressiveness originally intended for the inhibiting external authority."

"Such "self-evident" one-sidedness—the affirmation of a value so unquestioned, because so obviously unquestionable, as that of the Child whose innocence solicits our defense—is precisely, of course, what distinguishes public service announcements from the partisan discourse of political argumentation. But it is also, I suggest, what makes such announcements so oppressively political—political not in the partisan terms implied by the media consultant, but political in a far more insidious way: political insofar as the fantasy subtending the image of the Child invariably shapes the logic within which the political itself must be thought. That logic compels us, to the extent that we would register as politically responsible, to submit to the framing of political debate—and, indeed, of the political field—as defined by the terms of what this book describes as reproductive futurism: terms that impose an ideological limit on political discourse as such, preserving in the process the absolute privilege of heteronormativity by rendering unthinkable, by casting outside the political domain, the possibility of a queer resistance to this organizing principle of communal relations."

"This project stakes its claim to the very space that "politics" makes unthinkable: the space outside the framework within which politics as we know it appears and so outside the conflict of visions that share as their presupposition that the body politic must survive. Indeed, at the heart of my polemical engagement with the cultural text of politics and the politics of cultural texts lies a simple provocation: that queerness names the side of those not "fighting for the children," the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism."

"Jokiness allows a constant trivializing: as if by joking someone is suspending judgment on what is being said. She didn’t mean anything by it; lighten up. A killjoy knows from experience: when people keep making light of something, something heavy is going on"

"There are some who hold onto rigid ideas of w:Femalebiological sex, but I do not expect feminists to be among them. When I hear people refer in code to "biology 101," meaning the scientific basis of female and male sex difference, to claim that trans women are not “biologically women,” I want to offer in rebuke, “Biology 101? Patriarchy wrote that textbook!” and pass them a copy of Andrea Dworkin’s Woman Hating, a radical feminist text that supports transsexuals having access to surgery and hormones and challenges what she calls “the traditional biology of sexual difference” based on “two discrete biological sexes.” To be so-called gender critical while leaving traditional biology intact tightens rather than loosens the hold of a gender system on our bodies."

"To point out harassment is to be viewed as the harasser; to point out oppression is to be viewed as oppressive."

"Transphobia and antitrans statements should not be treated as just another viewpoint that we should be free to express at the happy table of diversity. There cannot be a dialogue when some at the table are in effect (or intent on) arguing for the elimination of others at the table. When you have “dialogue or debate” with those who wish to eliminate you from the conversation (because they do not recognize what is necessary for your survival, or because they don’t even think your existence is possible), then “dialogue and debate” becomes a technique of elimination. A refusal to have some dialogues and some debates is thus a key tactic for survival."

"Money is the only currency in the family. ...It literally stands in for everything else: love, affection, respect. It's understandable that... my family members would cling to it so desperately, and want to acquire it."

"Once my Dad was out of the family business and was branded a failure, he and anyone connected to him (which would have been me) no longer mattered. So there was this level of thoughtlessness around us. So luckily we were able to laugh about it, because it's really not very funny, although some of the presents were quite hysterical... to have your uncle and his wife, who were extraordinarily wealthy, give you a 3-pack of underwear for Christmas... was a bit beyond the pale... My mom... was even lower on the totem pole than I was... Donald didn't even recognize that they were presents that he had given me."

"I do feel that I have to do whatever I can to make sure that people are informed and understand exactly what's going on with this man."

"We're talking about a man who has control of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. That makes him more dangerous than... other people, because he has the nuclear codes."

"Ms. Trump, who at 55 has long been estranged from President Trump, is the first member of the Trump clan to break ranks with her relatives by writing a book about their secrets."

"[] is the origin... the ground zero of all of the family dysfunction... I believe that he was a sociopath. ...He had no real human feeling for anybody, including his children, and was quite adept at using people to his own ends; and if he found them not to be of use, he had no compunction about discarding them. ...[H]e enjoyed humiliating other weaker people a great deal."

"I was actually a bit surprised at how surprised people were by the SAT story when... the book first came out, just as I was surprised at the reaction to... his use of racist and antisemitic language because, look what he does... It shouldn't surprise anybody that it started that long ago,.. especially since my grandfather also believed that you do whatever you need to do to succeed: cheat, lie, work with the mafia, whatever."

"Donald learned that in order to be, not just protected from his father but favored by his father, he needed to be this larger than life, great, fantastic... Part of it was the toxic positivity, and part of it was just... having to convince Fred Trump Sr. that... Donald belonged on the planet and... should survive, and should succeed, and he needed to make it clear to Fred that Donald could be of use to him."

"Everything's about money in this family, but I'm also different... [M]oney stood in for everything else; it was literally the only currency the family trafficked in... I knew that it was also about love, and to be disinherited... shut out entirely... was to be told quite explicitly that you don't count, and you are not loved."

"I needed to tell the [origin] story of the family because there's so much at stake."

"He's dangerous because of the power that attaches to the office he holds... because he's so susceptible to powerful, smarter... people. It's very easy to get him to do your bidding. ...[W]e've seen a lot of evidence of that. You need just flatter him, and... whether you're Kim Jong-un or Vladimir Putin, he'll... stop the sanctions or he'll look the other way when you start building more nuclear missiles. It's quite terrifying, and in addition to that, we're talking about somebody who's quite unstable... [T]he more pressure he's under (because he's completely out of his depth here)... the more cornered he's going to feel and the more he's going to lash out... [T]hat's what we need to watch out for in the next few months."

"Donald learned that you could never admit you're wrong. That was considered a weakness and we've seen that, starkly, with the Covid 19 situation. He didn't do anything right away, and then when it was almost past time to do the right thing that would have meant admitting that he hadn't done the right thing in the first place. ...[T]hat wasn't going to happen, so the situation got worse and worse... [C]losely related to that was this idea of the power of positive thinking, which my grandfather really bought into... [E]ssentially, he took it to such an extreme that it became a kind of toxic positivity."

"To make it worse... for Donald, when he was very young, 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 approximately... his mother, who was really his only source of human connection and comfort... got very ill and was, to all intents and purposes, absent from his life. So he suddenly found himself, so young, basically alone in the world because my grandfather was incapable of filling the void left by my grandmother's absence. ...Because of the very vulnerable age he was [at] when she became sick, I think on some level he experienced that as a betrayal. She didn't have the capacity to heal the rift, even after she was [physically] able to, and I think that stuck with him..."

"It's forcing the media to have a conversation that they've never wanted to have, and never have had, which is about Donald's psychological health."

"Mary Trump’s father, Fred Jr.... died of an alcohol-related illness in 1981, when she was 16 years old. ...[S]he infuses the volume with her background as a clinical psychologist to analyze her uncle. ...Decades ago ...Trump asked her to help write his book The Art of the Comeback. She says she did research ...but ...the publisher eventually sought someone with more experience ...Mary Trump says, she was told that she was told that her grandfather’s estate was worth $30 million. But after being contacted by a reporter for the New York Times in 2017, she retrieved boxes of financial papers that she says showed the estate was actually worth $1 billion. She writes that she became a key source for the newspaper’s 2018 investigation of the family finances, which won a Pulitzer Prize."

"This is a man who bankrupted casinos, which is a hard thing to do, and then was given a TV show in the early 2000s that portrayed him as this real estate mastermind. So... every failure along the way has been met with more money thrown at him by the banks, more glowing media coverage about what a brash, brilliant guy he is. ...It's taken a lot of people to help him fail upward. ...[H]e may be useless, but he's got a lot of power. They're willing to put up with, or overlook, or ignore entirely his behavior, his crassness and his incompetence."

"One of the unforgivable things that my grandfather did to Donald... he severely restricted the range of human emotion that was accessible to him. ...[C]ertain feelings were not allowed: sadness... the impulse to be kind... generous... Those things that my grandfather found superfluous, unmanly... a stupid waste of time... were punished; ruthlessly punished."

"[M]y dad couldn't change who he was, so he was... dismantled over time."