Lgbt People

"The work of stopping US bombs from being dropped and bringing the US troops home, of ending war and creating lasting peace with justice requires a fundamental commitment to multi-issue organizing. At an anti-war protest not long ago, I saw a placard announcing "An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind." This slogan is one of many that turns disability into a metaphor, reinforces that disability means broken and is fundamentally undesirable, and ignores the multitude of actual lived disability experiences connected to war. For folks who know blindness/disability as a consequence of crushing military force, the "eye for an eye" slogan offers a superficial rationale for nonviolence but no lasting justice. In response, I'd like to stand next to those anti-war activists and hold a placard that reads "Another crip for peace," or maybe, "Blindness is sexy; military force is not." Because disability is one of the major consequences of war, we need an anti-war politics that doesn't transform disability into a symbol of either patriotism or tragedy, a politics that thinks hard about disability. Who gets killed, and who becomes disabled? Who profits from that killing and disabling? Whose bodies are used as weapons, and whose are treated as expendable? What happens to the countless people shattered, broken, burned, terrorized?"

"In many trans and queer communities today, my particular gendered story is not all that unusual. But outside those communities, the reality of a white guy having a long, prideful lesbian past can be totally disorienting. Rather than explain myself in the face of cultural confusion, anger, and/or hatred, I yearn for the day when all the rules that confine and constrain gender, that punish gender transgression - rules shaped by misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, and shaped again by white supremacy, capitalism, ableism - come crashing down. I want my gendered story to be one of many stories that defy, bend, smash the gender binary. But in the end, what I really want is for all the many gendered possibilities in the world to be, not normal, but rather profoundly ordinary and familiar. (from "A Note about Gender, or Why Is This White Guy Writing about Being a Lesbian?")"

"How is wartime violence brought home, in which nightmares and flashbacks, in what rage and addiction? All the answers depend upon naming disability and committing to a multi-layered analysis of how white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, and ableism work in concert."

"In the decade since the initial release of Exile and Pride, I've often been asked, “What do you want readers to take away from your book?" The answer has become one of my activist mantras: "I want nondisabled progressive activists to add disability to their political agenda. And at the same time I want disability activists to abandon their single-issue politics and strategies." My answer remains as true in 2009 as it was in 1999. It's only been ten years, but I must say I'm impatient for my mantra to lose its relevancy. How long must we wait, for instance, before ADAPT and Critical Resistance join forces?"

"Opium awakens the appetite at first, during that initial phase it never surpasses.Afterwards... nothing matters anymore — not love, not hunger, not anguish, not death."

"I love hearing people talk about France. You can't imagine how much I would like to know it. Sometimes at night, when I was little, I would dream that I was finally there. I would wake up and cry under my mosquito net when I realized it was only a dream."

"One can never say enough how moving a first kiss is."

"I love difficulty. Things easily won have less value."

"They were expanding the same amount of energy not to put on a show. As if to say, "This is your home and you're welcome here as you are." I think it's important to note that that takes work: family doesn't just happen; welcome isn't a neutral state. We have to tend to these things."

"If our religions aren't about the business of achieving justice in our time, in this world, for everyone, what are they doing?"

"You must believe he has enough drive to become king. Thorin must be physically capable of doing so."

"“Burn the Place” is divided into three parts, focussing on Regan’s childhood, her alcoholism, and her present-day recovery and restaurant ownership. The sections are constructed of scraps and vignettes, fragmentary pieces of memory that hop around the time line, following their own ordinal logic. Regan’s recollections are concrete and achingly precise—she is particularly attuned to scent, conjuring wafts of decaying oak leaves revealed under thawing snow, the earthy, fungal funk of a sourdough starter, the sharp tang of a metal key bearing a bump of cocaine—but they break and flow with a dreamlike disorientation."

"Traveling around the country gave her new perspective and a break from her everyday life of running a restaurant, which she emphasized was a 24-hour job that required her to not only create a menu, but to do the bookkeeping, run payroll and manage the staff. Regan, who grew up on a 10-acre farm in Indiana, said it helped her realize that she wanted to bring food to a table and incorporate a lifestyle element in her projects. After months of searching, Regan found the location for Milkweed Inn in in the . It’s near the and is surrounded by lush woods on multiple acres with a river running through it."

"FISHERMEN AND HUNTERS WELCOME. MICHIGAN CHERRIES. SUGAR BEETS AND CORN. The banner at the truck stop rotated with these simple phrases. ... The seasons out here were determined by there was to fish, hunt, forage, pick, and so on, you understand. Most people were hunters and fishermen and animals were their prey, which left the flora to people like me. ... I liked truck stops. Sometimes I had cravings for that sort of meat and potatoes type of American cuisine you could find at a truck stop. Because I'm a fine-dining chef, people think I eat fancy most of the time. That is very far from the truth."

"Summers were everything because I didn't have school, and I hated school. I wasn't good at like some other kids. And there were a lot of kids at school. I liked to keep to myself, so things like school or anything that brought kids together made things sort of difficult. It was a people thing. In the summer, I kept track of time by what we foraged, like , s, , s, , , and by event's like Mom's birthday, the , my birthday, the county fair."

"As much as I’m honored by this award, I do want to address what’s happening right now outside of the building. There are ruthless attacks that are creating fear and chaos in our communities in the name of law and order. Trump is using military forces to stop a protest. And I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us. What type of government is that? People are being swept up and torn from their families, and I feel it's my responsibility as an artist to use this moment to speak up for all oppressed people. For Black people, for Latino people, for trans people, for the people in Gaza. We all deserve to live in hope and not in fear, and I hope we stand together, my brothers and my sisters, against hate, and we protest against it."

"The farmhouse was like a lot of farmhouses, I imagine. I was in love with that place. Everything about it was outrageously enchanting. It was in that house that I cooked my first s, gathered from my grandfather's farm. I stood on a footstool and stirred in the butter. My mom and I added salt and pepper. The earthy aroma filled my sense memory. I never forgot."

"My grandfather’s farm, 100 acres of corn fields, s, trees, ponds, abandoned cabins, sand, wild berries, and mushrooms, was nothing short of another universe full of magic. My dad’s father, George, was handsome and sweet. We drove up the side drive, past the house, and stopped just before the large barn and gate, which led back to the woods. The path to the woods was lined with wild and and sometimes if I was there on Sundays after the Lone Ranger episodes, I’d walk the trail and pick them into a small basket. Then I retreated back to the porch with the basket on my lap and ate every single one."

"Homosexuality was part of the plan of nature and creation just like normal love."

"The collapse at Sedan, like that of the Prussians at Jena sixty-four years earlier, was the result not simply of faulty command but of a faulty military system; and the military system of a nation is not an independent section of the social system but an aspect of it in its totality. The French had good reason to look on their disasters as a judgment. The social and economic developments of the past fifty years had brought about a military as well an industrial revolution. The Prussians had kept abreast of it and France had not. Therein lay the basic cause of her defeat."

""Covenants without swords are but words." Thus did Hobbes sum up, typically, one of the more elementary and depressing truths of political science. At the root of save all the most primitive or the most celestial of social organizations there must lie the sanction of force: force not to create right but to uphold it; force to assure order, to cow rebellion at home and to subdue enemies abroad. That it is not in itself the foundation of society, that it is only the one factor out of many which go to constitute a political community, has been emphasized by political thinkers at least since the days of St Augustine. But as yet no community of any degree of complexity has succeeded in existing without force, and the manner in which that force is organized and controlled will largely determine the political structure of the State."

"Hobbes's ideas seemed at least as relevant to the middle decades of the twentieth century as they had been to those of the seventeenth. (Happy the generation now growing up in our universities whose natural affinity appears to be rather with Rousseau!) A situation in which recourse to force is such an imminent probability that one's whole life and policy has to be adjusted to it is not, save in the most formal sense, a state of peace. It is for that reason that I equate peace with that unfashionable term 'Order'; an emphasis which probably brands me as a temperamental Tory rather than a temperamental Whig."

"The system-builders, from Hegel to Toynbee, selected facts from history to prove an a priori thesis, and presented subjective works of art as objective statements of fact. But the old positivist belief in the possibility of a truly scientific and objective history is no longer held even by the most fanatical members of the Institute of Historical Research."

"The gravamen of Geyl’s charge against Toynbee is not that he makes sense of the past: it is that to do so he resorts to quite ludicrous distortions, selecting evidence to conform to his views and ignoring all that does not. The abuse of history in fact lies less often in the motives of the historian than in his methods. It was after all the most honourable loyalties and affections which led Cardinal Gasquet to attempt the vindication of the monastic orders against the charges of Protestant historians; the formidable Coulton may have been inspired merely by acrimonious anti-Popish spite; but Coulton was an honest scholar, and Gasquet, one is forced to conclude, was not."

"So long as the conventional balance remains so uneven, the Western strategy of relying on the first use of nuclear weapons to defend ourselves is not only morally dubious but politically incredible. But the responsibility for this strategy does not lie with the United States. It lies with the governments and peoples of Western Europe who have, for the last thirty years, refused to take the necessary measures to provide for their own conventional defence. That is where the CND is so dangerous. Their present campaign is sending a signal both to Moscow and to the United States, not simply that the peoples of Western Europe are not prepared to defend themselves with nuclear weapons, but that they are not prepared to defend themselves at all: a signal that could create a quite terrifying degree of instability by presenting the leaders of the Soviet Union with options that hitherto have been firmly closed to them."

"In the ranks of a relatively small party, the anarchist, it seemed to me as if proportionately more homosexuals and effeminates are found than in others."

"The more we delve into the essence of personality, the more we learn that in this world, certainly rich with natural beauty and things worthy of seeing, nothing is more attractive and worthier of knowing and experiencing than people."

"The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed... Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere where the Code Napoléon was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the rights of the individual... In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated... May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"

"Emma Goldman has campaigned boldly and steadfastly for individual rights, and especially for those deprived of their rights. Thus it came about that she was the first and only woman, indeed the first and only American, to take up the defense of homosexual love before the general public."

"Many Christians, of whom I am one, see no moral dilemma inherent in the possession, and if necessary the use, of nuclear weapons to deter their use against our own peoples by a Soviet state whose leaders are explicitly unconstrained by those considerations of "bourgeois morality" which so properly worry us. It is the initiation of the use of these weapons that causes so many of us such profound concern; and we have come to depend on that initiation because we have acquiesced in a decision to maintain a standard of living far higher than that of our adversaries, rather than provide the resources needed for a convincing defence by non-nuclear means of the territories of Western Europe."

"The Foreign Secretary's Malcolm Rifkind] apologia for Nato enlargement is strong on dogmatic assertion but weak on reasoned argument... "Neither the new Nato nor its expansion poses a threat to Russia". That surely is for the Russians to say. After all, we were taught during the Cold War to base our policies on the capabilities of our adversaries rather than their intentions. To take account of Russian susceptibilities is not to accept their veto over our policies. It is simply to recognise that there can never be stability in Europe unless the Russians feel secure, and to ride roughshod over their susceptibilities is not a very sensible way to guarantee the security of their neighbours to the west."

"Michael Howard is an excellent and succinct writer and his book is very easy to read."

"An elegance of style which, since his much esteemed early work The Franco-Prussian War, has always distinguished his writing has not been achieved by a sacrifice of accuracy or relentless extension of his "wide learning", and his critical judgments – sometimes feline, sometimes ruthless – are usually cogent. More than that. I suppose that during recent decades nobody on either side of the Atlantic has so effectively brought military studies securely within the domain of the humane disciplines. If he has not civilized Bellona single-handed, he is primus inter pares."

"So this guy goes into the dining hall and this is the first week after the attack and there is just this sombre sadness and you hear the guy go, 'guys, guys, you're not gonna believe whose been cooking your dinners. It's Batman!"

"I don’t come from wealth, I don’t have that to fall back on. So I am going to have to raise money, and fortunately, I’ve had experience doing that as the Speaker and the Pro Tem to protect my caucuses."

"It’s a combination of story and experience. I truly believe my record shows I’m the most qualified candidate based on the experience and the things that I’ve done."

"She always included us and there was never any surprises. I didn’t agree with what was going on, but we had input and participation."

"I’m very interested in looking at that possibility of running for governor. I am looking at it seriously."

"We want to preserve what we’ve done. It took a lot of work. I would not gravitate toward raising taxes in this moment. I don’t think it’s called for yet."

"I sort of feel like I’m addicted to responsibility. I think experience counts and matters, and I believe I have experience to continue to contribute in some way."

"I certainly don’t fit the mold of past governors or even some of the candidates that will be in this race. I’m going to lean on my story, because I think Californians are going to want someone more like them."

"When girls flourish the whole world flourishes."

"like every LGBTQIA+ child who has come out of the closet only to be thrown out of the house, I feel bereft. The South African church that was the mother of my faith has disowned me."

"For girls to flourish their voices must be heard, their choices honoured, and their right to bodily integrity affirmed."

"If you conceptualize leadership as power over people, Ubuntu doesn’t have a place in that conceptualization. If you conceptualize leadership as power with people, it completely changes the way you operate, even as a leader."

"Forgiveness is not easy; it can seem like an impossible task. According to Mpho, only through walking this fourfold path, we free ourselves from the endless cycle of pain and retribution."

"forgiveness is the biggest help to transition away from the stereotypical patriarchal model that both women and men suffer under."

"Privilege is there is almost nothing about you that I have to know, and yet you know so much about me."

"To me, authentic leadership is leadership from the heart; from the center: that one recognizes the core of one’s being and leads from that space."

"Before transformation there must be the belief that transformation is possible, and the willingness to be transformed."