"Silence kills the soul, it diminishes its possibility to rise and fly and explore. Silence withers what makes you human. The soul shrinks, until it's nothing."
-- Marlon Riggs

"Always admit when you're wrong. You'll save thousands in therapy later -- and a few friendships too." -- Harvey Fierstein

"The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life."
-- Jane Addams

"I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty." -- Georgia O'Keefe

"As long as men are free to ask what they must, free to say what they think, free to think what they will, freedom can never be lost and science can never regress."
-- Marcel Proust

"Change your mind as often as possible. Just because you thought something yesterday doesn't mean you have to think it today. Don't ever become a prisoner of your own opinion."
-- Harvey Fierstein

"If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive." -- Audre Lorde

"A child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled." -- James Baldwin

“Equality is more than tolerance, compassion, understanding, acceptance, benevolence, for these still come from a place of implied superiority: favors granted to those less fortunate. These attitudes suggest that there is still something wrong, something not quite right that must be overlooked or seen beyond."
-- Suzanne Pharr

"The trouble is that not enough people have come together with the firm determination to live the things which they say they believe."
-- Eleanor Roosevelt

"To me an unnecessary action, or shot, or casualty, was not only waste but sin." -- Thomas Edward Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands." -- Michelangelo Buonarroti

"They have to convert our agenda into something aggressive. Two guys wanting to be happy together are invading their marriages. Helping a kid who's getting beaten up at school is promoting homosexuality. If you gave me a million dollars, I wouldn't know how to promote homosexuality. Do I hire Don King?"
-- Barney Frank U.S. Representative

"....Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?"
-- United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld

"To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing it's best night and day to make you everyone else, means to fight the hardest battle that any human being can fight, and to never stop fighting."
-- e.e. cummings

"Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge." -- Gordon W. Allport

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot." -- Horace Greeley

"There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self." -- Aldous Huxley

"The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well."
-- Joe Ancis

"Pick battles big enough to matter, small enough to win."
-- Jonathan Kozol

"Wanting to be someone you're not is a waste of the person you are."
-- Kurt Cobain

“In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light, and what is elusive and deceptive resolves itself into crystal clearness. Our life is a long and arduous quest after Truth.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi

“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”
-- Martin Fraquhar Tupper

“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
-- The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“It is a great thing to know the season for speech and the season for silence.”
-- Seneca

"Silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech."-- Susan Sontag

"Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak. Courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. ---Winston Churchill