All Quotes

"It is easy for a rabbi to establish prohibitions, but a rabbi's real strength is to teach Torah and rule on law with an emphasis on what is permitted."

"Saving a life overrides territories."

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable. […] The Lord shall return the Arabs' deeds on their own heads, waste their seed and exterminate them, devastate them and vanish them from this world."

"היה צונאמי ויש אסונות טבע נוראיים. כל זה ממיעוט התורה. איפה שיש תורה זה מקיים את העולם. שמה [בניו אורלינס] יש שם כושים. כושים ילמדו תורה? יאללה נביא להם צונאמי, נטביע אותם. מאות אלפים נשארו בלי קורת גג. עשרות אלפים הרוגים. כל זה כי אין להם הקדוש ברוך הוא.‏ There was a tsunami and there are terrible natural disasters, all of this because of too little Torah study. Where there is Torah it sustains the world. There are negros there [in New Orleans]. Negros will study Torah? Let's bring them a tsunami, drown them. Hundreds of thousands were left without a shelter. Tens of thousands died. All of this is because they have no God."

"A Druze soldier who stood guard to protect Israel against vengeful enemies, and was killed by Ishmaelites - it is proper to say a 'hashkava' [prayer] in synagogue for the benefit of his soul... The Druze believe in one God and are not idolaters at all, and also believe in the persistence of the soul [after death], and all the more so they enlist in the IDF and sacrifice themselves to protect the inhabitants of the State of Israel, and they keep the Seven Mitzvot of the Children of Noah, and their status is as Righteous of the Nations of the World."

"It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."

"“Goyim were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel,”."

"Why are Gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat. That is why Gentiles were created."

"In Israel, death has no dominion over them...With gentiles, it will be like any person – they need to die, but (God) will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money. This is his servant...That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew. Gentiles were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel."

"They don't observe the Sabbath, they don't observe the Torah, they don't pray, they don't put on phylacteries every day. Is it any wonder that they're killed? It's no wonder. May the Almighty have mercy on them and bring them back to religion."

"The most significant halachic authority of the last 100 years, whose positions helped fashion a balanced and moderate Judaism."

"The Islamic community today is faced with a new version of an old struggle. My late mother used to say it doesn't matter whether you came to this country on the Mayflower or on a slave ship, through Ellis Island or the Rio Grande. We're all in the same boat now."

"Ketanji Brown Jackson questioning appealing to the worst instincts of the American people"

"There’s a word, and the word is called misogynoir. And that word describes the double whammy that women of color have to face: You’re vulnerable on the issue of gender, and you’re vulnerable on the issue of race."

"Openly homosexual people were prevented from joining the Communist Party and fired from their jobs. One of the country’s most distinguished writers, Reinaldo Arenas, recounted the prison experience he and countless other gay men endured in his memoir Before Night Falls. “It was a sweltering place without a bathroom,” he wrote. “Gays were not treated like human beings, they were treated like beasts. They were the last ones to come out for meals, so we saw them walk by, and the most insignificant incident was an excuse to beat them mercilessly.”"

"while Michael Warner (1993) defines queer as "resistance to regimes of the normal.""

"Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner (1995) suggest that participation in "queer publics," is, "more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history,""

"Queerness...[is] more a posture of opposition than a simple statement about sexuality. It [is] about principles, not particularities. 'To me,' explained [Queer Nation/San Francisco activist Karl] Knapper, 'queerness is about acknowledging and celebrating difference, embracing wha sets you apart. A straight person can't be gay, but a straight person can be queer."

"[There are] cases of straight queerness, and of other forms of queerness that might not be contained within existing categories or have reference to only one established category...new queer spaces open up (or are revealed) whenever someone moves away from using only one specific sexual identity category--gay, lesbian, bisexual, or straight--to understand and to describe mass culture, and recognizes that texts and people's responses to them are more sexually transmutable than any one category could signify--excepting, perhaps, that of 'queer.'"

"Conservative-led boycotts against companies that once embraced Pride festivities, like Target and Anheuser Busch, have led to billions of dollars of corporate losses. The backlash has also entered the 2024 presidential race, as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has staked his Republican primary hopes on opposition to L.G.B.T.Q. rights and has clashed with corporations, like Disney, that support them."

"The preference for 'queer' represents, among other things, an aggressive impulse of generalizations; it rejects a minoritizing logic of toleration or simple political interest-representation in favor of a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal. For academics, being interested in queer theory is a way to mess up the desexualized spaces of the academy, exude some rut, reimaging the public from and for which academic intellectuals write, dress, and perform....For both academics and activists, 'queer' gets a critical edge by defining itself against the normal rather than the heterosexual....The insistence on 'queer'...has the effect of pointing out a wide field of normalization, rather than simple intolerance, as the site of violence."

"Queer" involves "the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning [that occur] when the consituent elements of anyone's gender, of anyone's sexuality aren't made (or can't be made) to signifying monolithically... [including] drags, clones, leatherfolk...fantasists...feminist men...masturbators...people able to relish, learn from, or identify with such." She praises, "work around 'queer' [which] spins the term outward along dimensions that can't be subsumed under gender and sexuality at all." However, queer must denote "almost simply, same-sex sexual object choice, lesbian or gay...given the historical and contemporary force of the prohibitions against every same-sex sexual expression, for anyone to disavow those meanings, or to displace them from the term's definitional center, would be to dematerialize any possiblity of queerness itself."

"Queer has become "the discursive rallying point for younger lesbians and gay men and, in yet other contexts, for lesbian interventions and, in yet other contexts, for bisexuals and straights for whom the term expresses an affiliation with antihomophobic politics. That it can become such a discursive site whose uses are not fully constrained in advance ought to be safe-guarded not only for the purposes of continuing to democratize queer politics, but also to expose, affirm, and rework the specific historicity of the term.""

""'Queer' derives its force precisely through the repeated invocation by which it has become linked to accusation, pathologization, insult. This is an invocation by which a social bond among homophobic communities is formed through time. The interpellation echoes past interpellations, and binds the speakers, as if they spoke in unison across time. In this sense, it is always an imaginary chorus that taunts 'queer'"."

"As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean's work on being queer and queer not as being about who you're having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live."

"Thomas, Calvin, ed. (2000). "Introduction: Identification, Appropriation, Proliferation", Straight with a Twist: Queer Theory and the Subject of Heterosexuality. University of Illinois Press. ."

"Hostility and discrimination against homosexual individuals are well-established facts (Berrill, 1990). On occasion, these negative attitudes lead to hostile verbal and physical acts against gay individuals with little apparent motivation except a strong dislike (Herek, 1989). In fact, more than 90% of gay men and lesbians report being targets of verbal abuse or threats, and more than one-third report being survivors of violence related to their homosexuality (Fassinger, 1991 ). Although negative attitudes and behaviors toward gay individuals have been assumed to be associated with rigid moralistic beliefs, sexual ignorance, and fear of homosexuality, the etiology of these attitudes and behaviors remains a puzzle (Marmor, 1980). Weinberg ( 1972 ) labeled these attitudes and behaviors homophobia, which he de- fined as the dread of being in close quarters with homosexual men and women as well as irrational fear, hatred, and intolerance by heterosexual individuals of homosexual men and women."

"Although the causes of homophobia are unclear, several psychoanalytic explanations have emerged from the idea of homo- phobia as an anxiety-based phenomenon. One psychoanalytic explanation is that anxiety about the possibility of being or be- coming a homosexual may be a major factor in homophobia (West, 1977). For example, de Kuyper (1993) has asserted that homophobia is the result of the remnants of homosexuality in the heterosexual resolution of the Oedipal conflict. Whereas these notions are vague, psychoanalytic theories usually postulate that homophobia is a result of repressed homosexual urges or a form of latent homosexuality. Latent homosexuality can be defined as homosexual arousal which the individual is either unaware of or denies (West, 1977 ). Psychoanalysts use the concept of repressed or latent homosexuality to explain the emotional malaise and irrational attitudes displayed by some individuals who feel guilty about their erotic interests and struggle to deny and repress homosexual impulses. In fact, West ( 1977, p. 202) stated, "when placed in a situation that threatens to excite their own unwanted homosexual thoughts, they over- react with panic or anger." Slaby (1994) contended that anxiety about homosexuality typically does not occur in individuals who are same-sex Oriented, but it usually involves individuals who are ostensibly heterosexual and have difficulty integrating their homosexual feelings or activity. The relationship between homophobia and latent homosexuality has not been empirically investigated and is one of the purposes of the present study."

"The results of this study indicate that individuals who score in the homophobic range and admit negative affect toward homosexuality demonstrate significant sexual arousal to male homosexual erotic stimuli. These individuals were selected on the basis of their report of having only heterosexual arousal and experiences. Furthermore, their ratings of erection and arousal to homosexual stimuli were low and not significantly different from nonhomophobic men who demonstrated no significant in- crease in penile response to homosexual stimuli. These data are consistent with response discordance where verbal judgments are not consistent with physiological reactivity, as in the case of homophobic individuals viewing homosexual stimuli. Lang (1994) has noted that the most dramatic response discordance occurs with reports of feeling and physiologic responses. An- other possible explanation is found in various psychoanalytic theories, which have generally explained homophobia as a threat to an individual's own homosexual impulses causing repression, denial, or reaction formation (or all three; West, 1977). Generally, these varied explanations conceive of homo- phobia as one type of latent homosexuality where persons either are unaware of or deny their homosexual urges. These data are consistent with these notions. Another explanation of these data is found in Barlow, Sakheim, and Beck's (1983) theory of the role of anxiety and attention in sexual responding. It is possible that viewing homosexual stimuli causes negative emotions such as anxiety in homo- phobic men but not in nonhomophobic men. Because anxiety has been shown to enhance arousal and erection, this theory would predict increases in erection in homophobic men. Furthermore, it would indicate that a response to homosexual stimuli is a function of the threat condition rather than sexual arousal per se. Whereas difficulties of objectively evaluating psychoanalytic hypotheses are well-documented, these approaches would predict that sexual arousal is an intrinsic response to homosexual stimuli, whereas Barlow's (1986) theory would predict that sexual arousal to homosexual stimuli by homophobic individuals is a function of anxiety. These competing notions can and should be evaluated by future research."

"So if a man and a woman do the same thing, the man is much more likely to be labeled a homosexual. The double standard was especially pronounced among the male students, and everyone knows how freaky guys get about male homosexuality. But you could find it in the thinking of both sexes. Why does the double standard exist? I suspect it's because people consider male homosexuality so much worse than female-female love making. The greater social taboo implies that if a guy does something seriously "homo," it says more about what he must be, about impulses he can't control, than it would say about a woman doing the same thing, because it's not condemned for women. It's a pernicious attribution, to be sure, but double standards are not known for their fairness. Neither, for that matter, is homophobia."

"Between June 2022 and April 2023, ADL and GLAAD documented at least 356 anti-LGBTQ+ extremist and non-extremist incidents motivated by hate across the United States. From demonstrations aiming to intimidate organizers and attendees at drag shows, to bomb threats against hospitals that offer health care for LGBTQ+ people to a mass shooting that took the lives of five people in Colorado, incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism are an important part of a larger story about the heightened threats facing the LGBTQ+ community in the United States today."

"Homophobia is gay."

"ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE MARCH 31, 2005 edition of the New York Times, the editors ran an extraordinary photograph well above the fold and directly below the masthead. It showed a group of religious leaders meeting in Jerusalem the previous day: three Islamic muftis, a Sufi shiek, a Roman Catholic prelate, a Greek Orthodox and an Armenian patriarch, the Ashenazi chief rabbi, and the Sephardic chief rabbi. The purpose of their meeting? A long-overdue interfaith condemnation of religious violence in the Mideast? A call for the Israeli government to forswear the destruction of Palestinian homes in exchange for a pledge to discourage suicide bombers? A resolution against religious bigotry or an entreaty to end the maddening cycle of violence? Perhaps a summit to discuss the war in Iraq? Or the racially, religiously, and politically divisive effects of a huge wall that the Israeli government had been constructing to separate Jews from Palestinians? No. The religious leaders had gathered in Jerusalem to issue a joint statement of condemnation for a planned gay-pride festival in Jerusalem."

"Although it still exerts its ugly power, homophobia is old. All over the world, people are beginning to see that hatred and fear of people who are different from themselves are destructive to us all and instead are learning to welcome and celebrate our rich diversity. If this news has not yet reached your school, church, or town, it will. There's a whole new mentality being born. Society has controlled us by teaching us to hate ourselves. The voices of homophobia can demoralize us so effectively that we don't need anything beyond their constant judgement to make us feel ashamed. But you don't have to buy it. Through heroic acts of defiance, both in the delicate interior of the private mind and in the public world, gay and lesbian youth are casting off shame and the acceptance of second-class status and proclaiming their worth, their power, and their rightful place in the world."

"This is about a lot more than abortion. What happens if you have states change the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit, under the way the decision is written? What are the next things that are going to be attacked?"

"The media misquoted me, saying that I called homosexuals garbage. That was not what I said. As I talked about our concern for the health and diet of our children and other people's children, I said, "If they are exposed to homosexuality, I might as well feed them garbage." I think there is a difference, but I leave it to the reader to interpret as you wish- we did not resort to name-calling at any time during the campaign in Miami."

"There are homosexual adults who are living irresponsibly, who in the name of "human rights" seek social rights that in reality only give them license for perversion and the flaunting of their deviant ways. To allow this to continue is only an indication that rather than being a great society, we are a sick society. Justice is delayed and far too often bypassed on the basis of legal technicalities in order to preserve an individual's "rights," but right has been made a mockery. To talk about the "rights" of someone who has chosen to rebel against responsible living is nonsense. It is simply not true that all human beings have the same rights. Some human beings throw away their rights by throwing away their responsibilities when we no longer dare say no and prove we mean it by enforcing it. The power of the law is an empty gesture. All end up turning their backs on crime and/or that which would thrust them into an unpopular stance with the powerful makers of public opinion- the media."

"He had developed his own limited, or very simple style. He was never very keen on improving himself as a bass player and half the time I would play bass on the records because I would tend to do it quicker. Right back to those early records; I mean, at least half the bass on all recorded output is me anyway. … Rog used to come in and say, "Thank you very much" to me once in a while for winning him bass-playing polls."

"I've been in The Who, I've been in The Beatles and I've been in Pink Floyd! Top that!"

"Usually, in the studio, on this sort of thing ... you just go out and have a play over it, and see what comes, and it's usually — mostly — the first take that's the best one, and you find yourself repeating yourself thereafter."

"It's crazy that America gives such a paltry percentage of its GNP to the starving nations."

"The band? It's over. Reunited because of the good cause (Live 8), to get over the bad relationship, and not to have regrets."

"Where would rock and roll be without feedback?"

"Jimi Hendrix isn't as good as me!"

"Obviously, they're all a gang of idiots. But, you know... live and let live."

"I had a listen, I was intrigued … by this strange voice, and I went to her house, met her parents down in Kent, and she played me, it must have been forty or fifty songs, on tape, and I thought, I should try to do something. … We were making — Pink Floyd was making the Wish You Were Here album, and I think we had the record company people down at Abbey Road, in number 3, and I said to them "Do you want to hear something I've got? And they said "sure", so we found another room, and I played it to them, "The Man with the Child in His Eyes", and they said "Yep, thank you – we'll have it.""

"It is absolutely beautiful, isn't it? And its a sort of over two years before any of the other recordings she did. That is her singing at the age of 16, and having written those extraordinary lyrics — about whatever they're about."

"We want to spread this message of peace, and we want to raise the morale of the people who are defending their homeland there in Ukraine."

"Russia is not full of terrible people. It’s just that their leadership has gone so horribly wrong. ... A lot of the world is reacting in the right way. They are angry and they are frustrated. You can see and hear the frustration in the leaders of the other world’s countries. We can see it in the voice of your president, President Biden. He has let slip a couple of his feelings a couple of times over there. Other world leaders have done the same. And I think there’s a groundswell of opinion worldwide. This sort of thing shouldn’t be able to happen. It shouldn’t be able to be allowed. But we are in a world where still, here we are, a fifth of the way through the 21st century and still this obscene situation can happen. The mind boggles."

"In an era of showboating, Gilmour sounded like no one else: his playing was all about tone, texture and a kind of languid grandeur. The solos he pulled out for Pink Floyd’s Time, Money, Shine On You Crazy Diamond et al are, in a word, timeless."