lgbt-people

"death is where jimi hendrix is, where our revolution ended up."

"the farmer takes Jill down the well & all the king's horses & all the king's men can't put that baby together again crooked man crooked man pumpkin eater childhood stealer."

""I'm tired," I says. She says, "I know you are, but you can't stop now Precious, you gotta push." And I do."

"There has always been something wrong wif the tesses. The tesses paint a picture of me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an' my muver—my whole family, we more than dumb, we invisible."

"Whether we're talking about the cost of living crisis, whether we're talking about the genocide in Gaza, or generally the feeling that they were voted in on one word, change - and they've not offered a whole lot of it. The Green Party are here, and we're ready to give them that change."

"Bores put you in a mental cemetery while you are still walking."

"Under pressure, people admit to murder, setting fire to the village church, or robbing a bank, but never to being bores."

"[On drug legalisation] I've actually never taken a drug in my life, or even drunk alcohol, but I still don’t sit here as the fun police. I very clearly believe people should be able to do what they want to do. It just wasn’t for me.""

"[On the 2026 Gorton and Denton by-election] I'll be totally honest, when I heard Andy Burnham wasn't being selected, I punched the air and I thought it's very probable we can win this. I wasn't complacent but I knew we could do it."

"[On standing as a parliamentary candidate] I have lived in London for more than 20 years. As soon as a by-election comes up in London, I would definitely consider it."

"What is a bore? Maxwell definition: a vacuum cleaner of society, sucking up everything and giving nothing. How do you spot one? Bores are always eager to be seen talking to you."

"A Philhllene of extraordinary passion, [Winckelmann] loved every aspect of his image of Greece, seeing its two dominant essences as liberty and youth. According to him Greece epitomized freedom, while Egyptian culture had been stunted by its monarchism and conservatism and was the symbol of rigid authority and stagnation — which also happened to be non-European. In his mind, the Greek city-states contained the liberty without which it was impossible to create great art. Winckelmann, and his followers, loved this liberty and youth for their freshness and vitality. Yet he insisted upon the soft gentleness of Greek art, and the ‘noble simplicity’ and ‘serene greatness’ of Greek culture as a whole, which he saw as the result of the equable Greek climate. Moreover, central to his love of Greece was his appreciation of Greek homosexuality. Winckelmann himself was homosexual, and the major homosexual strand which has persisted in modern Hellenism has continued to be associated with him."

"So wie die Tiefe des Meers allezeit ruhig bleibt, die Oberfläche mag noch so wüten, ebenso zeiget der Ausdruck in den Figuren der Griechen bei allen Leidenschaften eine große und gesetzte Seele."

"Die Nachahmung des Schönen der Natur ist entweder auf einen einzelnen Vorwurf gerichtet, oder sie sammlet die Bemerkungen aus verschiedenen einzelnen, und bringet sie in eins. Jenes heißt eine ähnliche Kopie, ein Porträt machen; es ist der Weg zu holländischen Formen und Figuren. Dieses aber ist der Weg zum allgemeinen Schönen und zu idealischen Bildern desselben; und derselbe ist es, den die Griechen genommen haben."

"The rising sense of history would gradually transform the Roman marble quarry into a vast open-air museum where the unlearned touring public could discover the past. [...] The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology, herald of this ever-widening public significance, was Johann Joachim Winckelmann."

"Der gute Geschmack, welcher sich mehr und mehr durch die Welt ausbreitet, hat sich angefangen zuerst unter dem griechischen Himmel zu bilden. Alle Erfindungen fremder Völker kamen gleichsam nur als der erste Same nach Griechenland, und nahmen eine andere Natur und Gestalt an in dem Lande, welches Minerva, sagt man, vor allen Ländern, wegen der gemäßigten Jahreszeiten, die sie hier angetroffen, den Griechen zur Wohnung angewiesen, als ein Land welches kluge Köpfe hervorbringen würde."

"Surely the excellence of all poetry — what puts Shelley above Keats, Goethe above Shelley (in his Lyrics), and English, German and Italian Poetry so incomparably above French—surely the great thing is the co-ordination into a total mood, as distinguished from the charm of detached metaphors or descriptions or verses."

"Have you any ghosts at Okehurst, by the way?" I asked. The place seemed as if it required some to complete it." "I hope not," answered Oke, gravely. His gravity made me smile. "Why, would you dislike it if there were?" I asked. "If there are such things as ghosts," he replied," I don't think they should be taken lightly. God would not permit them to be, except as a warning or a punishment."

"Let us rather think gently of things, sad, but sad without ignominy, of friendships stillborn or untimely cut off, hurried by death into a place like that which holds the souls of the unchristened babies; often, like them, let us hope, removed to a sphere where such things grow finer and more fruitful, the sphere of the love of those we have not loved enough in life. But that at best is but a place of ghosts; so let us never forget, dear friends, how close all round lies Limbo, the Kingdom of Might-have-been."

"As towards most other things of which we have but little personal experience (foreigners, or socialists, or aristocrats, as the case may be), there is a degree of vague ill-will towards what is called Thinking."

"There is no end to the deceits of the past; we protest that we know it is cozening us, and it continues to cozen us just as much."

"There is something about the big, stately house, where the Immortal One had received all the minor Olympians, or their homage, which makes one feel why that grandson gradually left it to the portraits of the Friends and the Sweethearts, and to the Plaster-casts (gathering a garment of sooty dust), which seem in some hieratic relation to the busts and paintings and prints and silhouettes of that Man-God, portrayed at every age, and with every unlikeliness of smirk and frown, from the eye-flashing aquiline youth with locks tied back in a bag, half-Werther, half-Wilhelm Meister, through every variety of Goethe travelling through life with Roman ruins or grand ducal palaces as background, to Goethe in all the different forbiddingnesses of old age. Forbidding, but not enough, alas I for the sycophancies of Eckermann, the theatricalities of Byron, the shakable sentimental conceit of Jane Welsh Carlyle, who sends him a copy of verses and (of all embarrassing untidy presents) a long tail of "a woman's hair." (Faugh!) There he presides, variously Olympian, over the dreary 1820 wallpapers and sofas and card-tables, key-patterned or sham Gothic, but all faded and dust-engrained; among the dismal collections of ores and crystals and skulls and stuffed birds: a pantalooned and stocked and swallow-tailed Rentier Faust. And round him that court of huge blackened casts, Ludovisi Junos and Rondanini Joves, and various decapitated Adorantes and Ilioneuses; that other company of faded ladies, stomachered or short-waisted, Lottes and Lilis and Maximilianes and Christianes, Suleikas, Gretchens, and Ottilies, on whose love and love for him (as on the succulent roast ox-thighs of Homeric days) the god Wolfgang nourished and increased his own divinity."

"Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal’s trainbearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light four candles made of dead men’s fat, and perform certain rites about which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias. The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men’s fat for the candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish. “If it were not for that,” says Sor Asdrubale, “the Government would have had to suppress the lottery ages ago—eh!”"

"Having once seen Alice Oke in the reality, it was quite impossible to remember that one could have fancied her at all different: there was something so complete, so completely unlike every one else, in her personality, that she seemed always to have been present in one's consciousness, although present, perhaps, as an enigma."

"Leisure requires the evidence of our own feelings, because it is not so much a quality of time as a peculiar state of mind. We speak of leisure time, but what we really mean thereby is time in which we can feel at leisure. What being at leisure means is more easily felt than defined."

"The curate thinks you have no soul; I know that he has none."

"But in some canine Paradise Your wraith, I know, rebukes the moon,And quarters every plain and hill, Seeking its master... As for me This prayer at least the gods fulfill; That when I pass the flood and seeOld Charon by the Stygian coast Take toll of all the shades who land, Your little, faithful barking ghost May leap to lick my phantom hand."

"I am part of the Mass Shooting Generation, and it's an ugly club to be in."

"As a school shooting survivor, I began my life calling for an end to the mass murder of innocent children and adults using weapons manufactured by the United States. Witnessing the ongoing genocide in Gaza has served as a haunting, serious reminder that it is my life’s purpose to advocate against violence everywhere. My classmates had the right to a future they never got. The countless Palestinians our weapons continue to slaughter have the same rights. Human beings deserve healthcare, jobs, housing, and all the rights our country systematically withholds. It is my mission to fight for our fellow human beings’ right to live in dignity and prosperity."

"On 14 February 2018 a former pupil entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. After six minutes and 20 seconds of carnage, three teachers and 14 of Cameron Kasky's fellow students lay dead. The geography teacher Scott Biegel, whom Kasky had known well, died protecting his students from gunfire. When the shooting broke out, Kasky had been rushing to pick up his younger brother from a special needs class. Hustled into the nearest classroom, the brothers spent the remainder of the attack hiding in the dark, not knowing if the door would be opened by the shooter or a rescuer."

"Starting the night of the attack, Kasky and a handful of his classmates took to social media, demanding stricter gun control laws and the right to be able to go to school without the fear of being killed. As they typed and posted, the hashtag #NeverAgain went viral. "I found myself frantically Facebook posting. It was what I knew how to do," he says. "The next morning I was getting all these calls from reporters." The same thing happened to his friends. As well as doing broadcast interviews, Kasky wrote online comment pieces and - a week after the attack - he took part in a televised town-hall event. Standing in front of a large crowd of his peers and neighbours, he confronted Republican Florida Senator Marco Rubio over the money he had received from the National Rifle Association. "Senator Rubio can you tell me right now that you would not accept a single NRA donation in the future?" he demanded. The room exploded into chants and cheers. Kasky looked stunned and overwhelmed. He had just put one of the nation's most prominent politicians on the spot, live on national television. As momentum gathered behind the young campaigners, Kasky co-founded the group March For Our Lives and set about organising a demonstration in the nation's capital. Six weeks after the attack, on 24 March 2018, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Washington DC for the March For Our Lives protest. The Parkland students demanded a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, and stricter background checks for those wishing to buy guns."

"He is currently applying for college and plans to revive a podcast series, Cameron Kasky Knows Nothing - "my journey towards understanding folks who disagree with me" as he put it in the trailer. But what does he hope the legacy of the movement he co-founded will be? "I think the thing that March For Our Lives did for this country was, we told a whole generation of kids, 'We need to start working together, we need to start thinking. And just because we are little, does not mean we are inadequate when it comes to being part of the conversation.'""

"At 25 years old, Cameron Kasky is certain that he’s too young to be dealing with the back pain he’s been feeling. But the Democratic socialist and activist, who is announcing on Tuesday morning that he’s the latest entrant in a crowded primary to replace the 78-year-old representative Jerrold Nadler in New York’s 12th Congressional District, also thinks that the circumstances of his arrival in politics “fast-forwarded my aging a little bit.” At 17, Kasky, a survivor of the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, cofounded the gun-violence prevention group March for Our Lives. The work brought him to Capitol Hill to meet with lawmakers; it also led to his being swatted and doxxed."

"Cameron Kasky is a fighter. He knows what it’s like to be failed by the American political system. In 2018, Cameron survived the massacre at his high school in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 human beings. Faced with unspeakable tragedy, he united his classmates and led March For Our Lives, one of the largest movements in U.S. history. As a teenager, he stood up to Marco Rubio and the Republicans bought off by the gun lobby, and worked with legislators in Washington to pass life-saving gun safety legislation. But it’s not just about taking on MAGA: it’s about disrupting the system where both parties have paved the way for Trump’s regime. In the face of rising authoritarianism, Cameron is ready to take the fight back to Capitol Hill and represent progressive values for the greatest city in the world."

"The progressive shift comes as current Democratic Party leaders are historically unpopular, according to multiple recent polls, as many progressive voters look for major reforms and changes. Meanwhile, November polling by Data for Progress showed that Medicare-for-All, long maligned by critics as far-left and socialist, is backed by nearly two-thirds of voters, including a majority of independents and nearly half of Republicans. And poll results published by Gallup in September showed favorable views of socialism hit a new high of 66 percent among Democrats."

"Cameron Kasky could become the youngest member of Congress if he pulls off a win in the crowded race to replace New York's retiring 12th District Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler, 78, next year. But despite being in his mid-twenties, the longtime political activist is no stranger to the spotlight and taking bold action to push for change.< As a survivor of the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, which killed 17 people and injured 18, Kasky went on to co-found the student-led group Never Again MSD, advocating for stricter gun regulations to prevent future violence. Kasky also helped organize the nationwide March for Our Lives demonstration in March 2018. While that experience gave him a national profile and allowed him to meet people across the country, the 25-year-old said it also made him lose hope for a time. "I had to watch so many people burst into tears right before my eyes and tell me that I gave them hope. But I had lost hope myself," Kasky, who identifies as a democratic socialist, told Newsweek in a Wednesday Zoom interview. But from that experience of becoming jaded, he's now emerged determined to continue the fight. "I lacked the understanding that change takes longer than we thought it would," he said."

"Parkland school shooting survivor Cameron Kasky is running for New York’s open congressional seat. Kasky, 24, filed his candidacy this week, according to Federal Election Commission records. His move comes a month after Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler said he would retire in 2027. The activist, who did not respond to requests for comment, nodded to his run by changing his Instagram bio to “politician” on Tuesday and adding a link to his donation page. “All I can say at the moment is that the next generation of Democratic leaders will fight big tech, work to abolish ICE and hold immigration enforcement accountable, and reject money from organizations operating solely in the interest of right wing nationalist foreign governments,” he wrote. In high school, Kasky co-founded the gun violence prevention group March for Our Lives, which later faced funding shortfalls and internal turmoil. Like his would-be predecessor, the Florida native attended Columbia University before withdrawing to pursue activism full-time. He is now a contributor at The Bulwark and an MSNBC pundit. The race for New York’s 12th District is shaping up to be crowded—and possibly star-studded—with Jack Schlossberg, John F. Kennedy’s grandson, also exploring a run."

"Now, Kasky aims to bring his efforts to the halls of Congress, focusing his campaign on promoting an unabashedly progressive agenda. Those goals include passing Medicare-for-All, focusing on affordability, abolishing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, fighting the AI oligarchs and ending all U.S. funding to Israel, among others. The young progressive's agenda appears aligned with the moment for many on the left—particularly within New York City. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani just won a significant upset victory in the nation's largest city's election, resoundingly defeating former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo first in the Democratic primary and then again in the general election last month. That victory came after a staunchly progressive campaign focused on affordability, taxing the wealthy and criticizing Israel's war in Gaza, with millions in billionaire money spent against him to prop up his opponent. "The people in this district want progressive leadership in the country, and that is my agenda," Kasky told Newsweek. As is the case with many Democratic voters, Kasky believes the party needs to reprioritize and change strategy to meet the moment."

"A gender-equal society would be one where the word 'gender' does not exist: where everyone can be themselves."

"How lucky you are, to love and to be loved in return.”"

"I’m in love with that girl,” she said out loud in amazement, because she knew that this was a life-changing thing and life-changing things should be said aloud, should have a moment in time, and a place in the air, some molecular structure to make them real. I’m in love with that girl, she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.”"

"And so I think that has just given me a perspective of elevating my awareness and consciousness of how I want people to perceive it and receive what I’m doing, that I think gives me a greater sense of motivation and information to ground my characters in something that I feel people can actually take away with them"

"Well, Louie, you’ll know then that Leviticus also tells us not to cut our beards, not to wear linen and wool together nor to eat crayfish or frogs or snails. I’m afraid that if we adhered to Leviticus the entire French nation would be an abomination in the eyes of the Lord"

"And that was something that changed my career because it allowed people to see me in ways that they hadn’t before, which was as a full person. You could see that I could write, you could see that I could perform, you could see that I’m funny, you’re seeing the stories that I’m telling you, which are about my life"

"I think it allowed people to see me in a way they hadn’t been able to see me before because I was stepping into lots of characters and not necessarily projecting myself. Stand-up was the art form that I felt really amplified me as Dewayne, the person"

"I think stage presence and recognizing the relationship with the audience have helped me in the sense that I am very conscious that this is art that I want to be consumed by people, and if that is the case, then the people should be in mind when I’m creating art"

"I am in love. It just happened, I never sought it, but I couldn't turn away from it"

"Oh, this is a space where I have the most power in any kind of artistic lane that I’ve been able to occupy"

"In this particular time, the conversation around art and commerce is one that is very relevant.And having that conversation around the expectation of that relationship, what that relationship looks like, and the execution of trying to exist in that relationship, I think, is something that a lot of people can find relevance in and feels universal, just with existing in a capitalistic society.And as it continues to get more capitalistic, seeing how that affects art and the people that are trying to make it."

"I think there’s something very beautiful and artful about seeing people pursuing their dreams, some of the barriers they face, and what they do to push through that is a very universal journey. And so I hope while they’re laughing, they’re also gleaning the human side of it.And that’s something beautiful: that combination of humor and real grounded emotions"