All Quotes

"Playing it safe is not productive for anyone, because safety requires gays and lesbians to be invisible, and the inhumanity engendered by making people invisible is anything but safe, rather, it puts us all in danger. When we are banned from the places we should be welcomed, where we should not only be allowed but encouraged to speak, where should we go then?"

"Trying to fault gays and lesbians for standing up for their rights is backwards and unconscionable. We have no idea how powerful we actually are. We were never considered part of the general, respectable population."

"I am not so much angry as trying to find my own voice in the world, to find enough courage to speak up in the first place, then to go forth and use it, which both are monumental tasks and require more confidence than you'd think."

"The only way to push forward instead of wasting away in the purgatorial procrastination of worry is to just not care what the outcomes. I need to just start running downhill with my eyes shut. There are no guarantees that I will be able to survive this world, where the air is rare for minorities like myself. But that suits me just fine. I'm a risk taker that way."

"If you are not a feminist, you do not deserve to live. Do you think you grew out of the ground?"

"What people need to understand is pussy is the Front Door to Life. Do you get that? Nobody ever thinks about it like that in the dusty ancient cabinet of old white men that think they know everything."

"Feminism is nonnegotiable."

"With salons all over the West serving up specialties like "Barely Legal", removing all hair from the area to replicate the genitalia of an underage girl, as statutory rape seems all the rage."

"All of them who need to tell ladies to stop talking about sports and stay on the sidelines, because we are baby-making machines."

"Body dysmorphia has got to go.Its similar to a disease called "crazy eyes" not the way others look at you, but the way you see yourself. The insanity which we use as our vision...."

"There was never a lack of reasons to hate myself, to hate my body."

"Since the unfortunate victims pay for the pleasure themselves these are HIGH CRIMES that will go UNPUNISHED because they are self-inflicted."

"The quiet messages that affect and alter the way we view ourselves are controlled by an elite group of ignant men."

"I am admittedly insecure about my racial identity, an attitude that has much improved since my younger days when I absolutely abhorred it. Any attention paid to me being different was incredibly shameful...but the mirrors became too much...what a disappointing reality check!"

"I could care less where my breasts are as long as they are on my body, ... and I'm sorry I just don't care that much about gravity....My lawless, braless ways are rather outlaw."

"When your young and hungry and nobody's ever really accepted you because of your color and class, the hurt of your own family having cast you out in the first place still inside you somewhere, you dance hard because there is no other way to live, and when opportunity knocks its more of an abduction than a housecall."

"Swept up in a grand illusion that I might be able to eat, have a roof over my head, own some pretty dresses and realize, in a vastly heady way, that I could make a living doing my art, which was the only dream I ever had, what could I say but "Yes, where do I sign?""

"San Francisco fucking rules. I am so proud of my home town for legalizing gay marriage, sending gays and lesbians down to the city by the Bay that was built on rock and roll to tie the knot."

"Ugly. Is irrelevant. It is an immeasurable insult to a woman, and then supposedly the worst crime you can commit as a woman. But ugly, as beautiful, is an illusion. A matter of taste, a whim, an eye, a beholder, an opinion, a spin, light crossing the frame, paint, projection. The moment. Context."

"We have been threatened by a local conservative group who said they will picket the show unless I am fired and taken off the bill and replaced by someone else. Sorry. I am now more excited than ever to meet y'all. Personally, if you are going to picket a show, fine, but the fact that you are picketing my show, means you are stepping up to me, which means some very bad things could possibly happen to you."

"Then there is Dick Cheney, who essentially said that if Kerry is voted in as president, terrorism will hit America again. How is that? Is Cheney going to make some calls? Apparently he has the hook up."

"This presidential race is the biggest dick contest in history. "Your dick is indecisive!" "Your dick started an unnecessary war!" "Your dick didn't get injured enough in Vietnam!" "Your dick didn't even go to Vietnam!" "Your dick is soft on terrorism!" "Your dick started terrorism!" "Your dick blamed Vietnam vets for atrocities that made all vets unable to come home to a hero's welcome." "Your dick forged its way out of military service!" Has this kind of dick-waggling happened before outside of a pro-wrestling context?"

"So when some man says to me, "Don't you wish you were beautiful?" those are like killing words. That's my death, if I don't pummel it into his soft, not-yet-completely-formed radio disc-jockey skull that I am already beautiful, and I wish for nothing, other than for him to go away. I am so beautiful, sometimes people weep when they see me. And it has nothing to do with what I look like really, it is just that I gave myself the power to say that I am beautiful, and if I could do that, maybe there is hope for them too. You can't even get to me. I got special service, boundaries like the rings of Saturn. I am protected. I am four–five faggots deep all around me, who don't see your name on the list, who will not let you in here looking like that, who will hold you in a cold, hard, unflinching stare or back hand compliment you until you cry. If you even had the courage to ask me out you would have to do it by mail, sent months in advance, on a single 5×7 sheet of eggshell vellum, signed in blood and sealed in gold and scented with a light mist of the new fragrance by Alan Cumming, just so I could throw it away without becoming repulsed."

"It is a good life, if I watch myself. Kind of like when I used to diet, but now instead of limiting calories, I will not allow negative self-talk. I cut out insults like I cut out carbs and it is hard as hell because I crave self-abuse like hot, fresh sourdough bread, but you know you have to be nice to you if you are going to live together."

"Independence itself came to us as what Gandhi famously called a "wooden loaf'-a notional freedom tainted by the blood of the thousands who died during Partition."

"the writer is the mid wife of understanding."

"Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. I know the story of the Kashmiri pandits. I also know that the story that these Panun Kashmir pandits put out is false. However, this does not mean that injustice was not done. The British drew the map of India in 1899— so that country became a colonizing power the moment it became independent, and the Indian state has militarily intervened in Manipur, in Nagaland, in Mizoram, in Kashmir, in Telangana, during the Naxalbari uprising, in Punjab, in Hyderabad, in Goa, in Junagarh…"

"If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man's challenge to God. It's worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created. If you're not religious, then look at it this way. This world of ours is 4 600 000 000 years old. It could end in an afternoon."

"Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained."

"India lives in her villages, we are told in every other sanctimonious public speech, That's bullshit. India doesn't live in her villages. India dies in her villages. India gets kicked around in her villages. India lives in her cities. India's villages just live only to serve her cities. Her villages are her citizen's vassals and for that reason must be controlled and kept alive, but only just."

"Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence."

"The story of the Narmada valley is nothing less than the story of Modern India. Like the tiger in the Belgrade zoo during the NATO bombing, we've begun to eat our own limbs."

"These horrific murders are only a symptom of a deeper malaise. Life is hell for the living too. Whole populations — millions of Dalits, Adivasis, Muslims and Christians — are being forced to live in terror, unsure of when and from where the assault will come."

"Kashmir has never been an integral part of India. It is a historical fact. Even the Indian government has accepted this."

"A train full of pilgrims coming back from the destruction of this Ayodhya mosque which was disputed. The train caught fire; nobody knows who set fire to the train and 57 pilgrims were burnt..."

"Each [ideology], in the oppressive air of conformity which ideologies create, will force public figures to conform or be ruined on the scaffold of ridicule. In a society of ideological believers, nothing is more ridiculous than the individual who doubts and does not conform."

"[O]ur élite is primarily and increasingly managerial. A managerial élite manages. A crisis, unfortunately, requires thought. Thought is not a management function."

"Because the managerial élites are now so large and have such a dominant effect on our educational system, we are actually teaching most people to manage, not to think. Not only do we not reward thought, we punish it as unprofessional."

"I would remind you...that Socrates was executed not for saying what things were or should be, but for seeking practical indications of where some reasonable approximation of truth might be. He was executed not for his megalomania or grandiose propositions or certitudes, but for stubbornly doubting the absolute truths of others."

"[T]hree of [Newt Gingrich's] "Five Principles of American Civilization" deal with business, technology, and organization — all characteristics of work. There is no mention of liberty or equality or, for that matter, of democracy."

"But now, in this century of ideologies, the Gods and Destiny have been given new life. "Miracles in the world are many," Sophocles wrote in the fifth century BC. "There is no greater miracle than man." Suddenly, at the end of the twentieth century, we discover that no, after all, it isn't true. Historical inevitability is a greater miracle than man. As is the dialectic. As is the superiority of various groups according to blood type. As is the genius of an abstract mechanism called the market. As is the leadership of inanimate objects — called technology — which worker bees create and then, inevitably, are led by. These inevitabilities are great leaps backward into the arms of the Gods and Destiny."

"Realism isn't pessimism. And though the anti-reform interests have won an unconscionable number of battles over the last decade, the war is by no means over."

"Canada was built from its very beginnings on the belief that public leadership in the economy and on social issues would be as effective and cheap as anything done by the private sector."

"Indeed you can usually tell when the concepts of democracy and citizenship are weakening. There is an increase in the role of charity and in the worship of volunteerism. These represent the élite citizen's imitation of noblesse oblige; that is, of pretending to be aristocrats or oligarchs, as opposed to being citizens."

"The rise of democracy was driven by the citizens' desire to escape from the paternalistic and arbitrary charity of those with money. They accomplished this by replacing charity with a fair, balanced, arm's-length system of public obligation. The principle tool of that obligation was taxation."

"There is absolutely no reason why we have to deal with the mid-life crisis of our social policies by putting a bullet through their heads."

"The state-initiated referendum has always been a part of this [anti-democratic] logic. Stop the talk, we're going to decide, yes or no. At this point the citizen's role is to wave one flag or the other and cheer for one side of the simple question or the other. In other words, we're reduced to children."

"A referendum is little more than a "rumour of choice." The idea behind the mechanism, ever since its first modern manifestations two centuries ago under Napoleon, has been to replace democracy with the sensation of democracy. That is: to replace the slow, complex, eternally unclear continuity of democracy, and all the awkwardness of citizen participation, with something clear and fast which allows those in power to impose their agenda. Through an apparently simple question with a one-syllable answer, those who ask can get a blank cheque from the citizenry; that is, if they choose their moment well and come up with a winning question."

"This is a citizenry which is annoyed, confused, insulted, and uncertain of how to protect the structures of the public good they struggled so long to put in place. Abruptly the national élites seem to prefer playing another game in which the public good is subjected to what they say are larger truths. All of these turn out to be either pedantically utilitarian or highly romantic. The utilitarian involves the reduction of society to self-interest. The romantic involves the selling of economic mythology as a new universal religion."

"The strength of representative democracy is its ability to slow down those in power who wish to govern by blank cheque, but also those not in power who wish to yank the state about on the sole basis of their self-interest."