It’s gotten far easier to allow ourselves to hate than it is to choose to love.

If you can do nothing else, do whatever is in your power to make the people in your life feel completely unashamed of who they are.

Gender is like a Rubik’s Cube with one hundred squares per side, and every time you twist it to take a look at another angle, you make it that much harder a puzzle to solve.

Gender identity is our internal response to a social construction that attempts to make a connection between a person’s biological makeup and their eventual role in society.

Loneliness is a poison, but aloneness is a catalyst.

Never ask for permission to smile.

Everyone doesn’t need to have the same beliefs, we just need to start believing in everyone.

The pleasures of love are really quite wonderful--though I suspect they are rather a luxury and require a certain level of socioeconomic stability to be anything other than a mode of suffering.

Never tell anyone outside my staff that the Submarine Force and the First Air Fleet were responsible for the failure at Midway. The failure at Midway was mine.

The truth is, you know, we need our anodynes. You know that word, anodynes? We need that in life some times. A good warm bath can be one for you, or a whatever.

I wasn't terribly aware of Catwoman. She was a DC comics character and as a kid, I wasn't terribly fond of the DC comics characters. I was a Marvel boy.

Haie! Haie! These were the swift to harry; These the keen-scented; These were the souls of blood. Slow on the leash, pallid the leash-men!

I'm in charge of the State Department's 60,000-plus people all over the world, 275 posts.

Houston is kind of a melting pot. There are many different cultures and ethnicities represented out there.

Since all people are in the image of God, all deserve to be treated with the dignity the image affords.

You'd think one day we'd learn. You don't get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.

we didn't have much, but we had love.