"I have noticed that as soon as you have soldiers the story is called history. Before their arrival it is called myth, folktale, legend, fairy tale, oral poetry, ethnography. After the soldiers arrive, it is called history."
- Paula Gunn Allen

"After all, Lewis and Clark's story has never been just the triumphant tale of two white men, no matter what the white historians might need to believe. Sacagawea was not the primary hero of this story either, no matter what the Native American historians and I might want to believe. The story of Lewis and Clark is also the story of the approximately 45 nameless and faceless first- and second-generation European Americans who joined the journey, then left or completed it, often without monetary or historical compensation. Considering the time and place, I imagine those 45 were illiterate, low-skilled laborers subject to managerial whims and 19th century downsizing. And it is most certainly the story of the black slave York, who also cast votes during this allegedly democratic adventure. It's even the story of Seaman, the domesticated Newfoundland dog who must have been a welcome and friendly presence and who survived the risk of becoming supper during one lean time or another. The Lewis and Clark Expedition was exactly the kind of multicultural, trigenerational, bigendered, animal-friendly, government-supported, partly French-Canadian project that should rightly be celebrated by liberals and castigated by conservatives."
-- Sherman Alexie, in a Time magazine essay entitled "What Sacagewea Means to Me"

“My only regret about being gay is that I repressed it so long. I surrendered my youth to the people I feared when I could have been out there loving someone. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Life’s too damn short.”
-- Armistead Maupin

"You can hurt me. You can hate me, but do it because you know me, not because I’m a member of a group. Anyways, people aren’t grapes --- you can’t weigh them in a bunch, but I guess it’s easier than dealing with people as individuals. There, I’ve solved the riddle of prejudice: it saves time."
-- author, Rita Mae Brown

“The reward for conformity was that everyone liked you except yourself.” -- Rita Mae Brown

“No government has the right to tell its citizens when or whom to love. The only queer people are those who don't love anybody.”
-- Rita Mae Brown

“I believe in not being put into ‘either/or’ -- instead, I choose ‘and.’" -- Mandy Carter, black lesbian social justice activist and co-founder of the National Black Justice Coalition, explaining that she doesn’t have one identity that trumps all her other identities

“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.” -- Euro-American anthropologist, Margaret Mead

“For the very first time the young are seeing history being made before it is censored by their elders.” -- Margaret Mead