Main - New - Writing - Modern Mythology - Zoo Queer - Greenwood - Depression - Misc - FAQ

LITERARY, HISTORICAL, AND OTHERWISE

Comedians, Television, Movies, Etc.

"Bush is not Hitler. He would be if he applied himself. He just lazy." -- Margaret Cho

"I don't understand the appeal of strippers on the radio. I guess titties make a sound that only straight men and dogs can hear." -- Margaret Cho

"Never get Freudian with a man with a pickle." -- Jack McCoy, L&O

[Regarding England] "a godforsaken island filled with sheep where it rained all the time." -- Terry Jones

"And how Tom Cruise was nearly decapitated..." -- Fox 61 News Commercial

"Oh my god, there's a living room where the crack house used to be!" -- Queer Eye for the Straight Guy

"That's all. It will be finished tomorrow, and will no doubt be the finest literary work since William Shakespeare's Gay Boys in Bondage." -- Joss Whedon, footnote to BTVS draft

"He's here, he's queer, he wants to go to Pottery Barn, deal with it." -- Margaret Cho

"Hope is a dangerous thing. Drive a man insane." -- Red, The Shawshank Redemption

"The hardest thing in this world is to live in it." -- Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

"Get busy living, or get busy dying." -- The Shawshank Redemption

"Numfar, do the dance of joy!" -- Angel, the series

"People used to think that when someone dies, a crow carries their soul to the land of the dead. But sometimes, something so bad happens, that a terrible sadness is carried with it and the soul can't rest. And sometimes, just sometimes, the crow can bring that soul back to put the wrong things right." -- The Crow

"You're telling me to fight a creature of legend... with a stick?" -- Gargoyles

"Buildings burn, people die, real love is forever." -- Sarah, The Crow

"The truth is out there." -- X-Files

"Wise man say: forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza." -- Michaelangelo, TMNT

"Never lower your eyes to an enemy." -- Tatsu, TMNT

"Cricket? Nobody understands cricket! You gotta know what a crumpet is to understand cricket!" -- Raphael, TMNT

"Death comes for us all, Oroku Saki, but something much worse comes for you. For when you die, it will be... without honor." -- Splinter, TMNT

Fiction, Literature, Fanfic, Literary

"Straight. That's like, two drinks and a light switch away from being totally gay." -- Ruth

"A novelist's business is lying... In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane - bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren't there, we hear their voices, we watched the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. Is it any wonder that no truly respectable society has ever trusted its artists?" -- Ursula K. LeGuin

"When I make the mistake of imagining how a whole poem should unfold, I immediately want to destroy that plan. Nothing should supplant the true act of discovery." -- James Tate

"Words mean more than what is set down on paper. It takes the human voice to infuse them with shades of deeper meaning." -- Maya Angelou

"Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." -- Edward Abbey

"Inability to love is the central problem, because that inability maskes a certain terror, and that terror is the terror of being touched. And if you can't be touched, you can't be changed. And if you can't be changed, you can't be alive." -- James Baldwin

"When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds attached to it the rest of the world." -- John Muir

"The world needs Dreamers... to remind the rest of us what is possible." -- Redhawk, fanfic author

"God does not play dice with the universe: He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time." -- Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens

"Pandemonium? Pan shall rise again, my dear. The great god Pan." -- Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

"We traveled eastward, seeing nothing but the sky and the earth." -- William of Rubruck (an online edition is here)

"Well that's just what this party needs, a bunch of inebriated college students and a raging bonfire." -- Dacia, fanfic author

"Love life. Take great pleasure in small offerings. Believe that the world owes you nothing. Understand that every gift given to you is exactly that." -- Maya Angelou

"Stories make us more alive, more human, more courageous, more loving. Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith, faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically." -- Madeleine L'Engle

"I am struck once again by the unutterable beauty, terror, and strangeness of everything we think we know." -- Edward Abbey

"And yes, dear, I am a miracle. I’m a fucking hero. And a casualty. Both. Like you. You need to get a life." -- Ellen Miller, like being killed

"If you don’t like this life you have now, get a different one. Pick a life, any life. Yours." -- Ellen Miller, like being killed

"My lesbianism is an act of Christian charity. All those women out there praying for a man, and I'm giving them my share." -- Rita Mae Brown, Venus Envy

"If I'd survived my own best attempts at dying, it probably just wasn't in the cards for me to perish young." -- Sarah Van Arsdale, Toward Amnesia

Feminist & GLBT

"America and Canada are both democracies that have a constitution. The difference is, here we actually read it." -- Michael Leshner, Canadian

"If you're black in this country, if you're a woman in this country, if you are any minority in this country at all, what could possibly possess you to vote Republican?" -- Cher

"The world needs a new weapon, the estrogen bomb. Imagine: You drop it on an area of violent conflict, and men throw down their guns, hug each other, apologize, say it was all their fault, and then start to clean up the mess." -- The Guerrilla Girls

"I have never met a man who didn't feel uneasy about masculinity, who didn't feel that in some way he wasn't living up to what it meant to be a man. There's a reason for that: Masculinity is a fraud; it's a trap. None of us are man enough." -- Robert Jensen

"I'm not missing a minute of this - it's the revolution!" -- Sylvia Rivera

"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth. And you should save it for someone you love." -- Butch Hancock

"Not knowing women's history and trying to understand the world is like not knowing odd numbers and trying to figure out math." -- Mary Ruthsdotter

"We have met the enemy, and he can't spell." -- Cathy Renna of GLAAD

"Violence against people who break gender rules is not born in a vacuum. It is born out of the smaller social violence that first robs us of our full humanity." -- Riki Wilchins

"If homosexuality is a disease, let's all call in queer to work: 'Hello. Can't work today, still queer." -- Robin Tyler

"I'd rather be black than gay because when you're black you don't have to tell your mother." -- Charles Pierce

"The one bonus of not lifting the ban on gays in the military is that the next time the government mandates a draft we can all declare homosexuality instead of running off to Canada." -- Lorne Bloch

"Why can't they have gay people in the army? Personally, I think they are just afraid of a thousand guys with M16s going, 'Who'd you call a faggot?'" -- Jon Stewart

"Soldiers who are not afraid of guns, bombs, capture, torture or death say they are afraid of homosexuals. Clearly we should not be used as soldiers; we should be used as weapons." -- Letter to the Editor, The Advocate

"My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror." -- W.Somerset Maugham

"Drag is when a man wears everything a lesbian won't." -- Author Unknown

"If male homosexuals are called 'gay,' then female homosexuals should be called 'ecstatic.'" -- Shelly Roberts

"My mother took me to a psychiatrist when I was fifteen because she thought I was a latent homosexual. There was nothing latent about it." -- Amanda Bearse

"It always seemed to me a bit pointless to disapprove of homosexuality. It's like disapproving of rain." -- Francis Maude

"The only queer people are those who don't love anybody." -- Rita Mae Brown

"The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision." -- Lynn Lavner

"If it weren't for gay men I wouldn't talk to men at all." -- Margaret Cho

"Introductions are tricky in a lesbian relationship. To my friends she's my lover, to strangers and family members she's my roommate, to Jehovah's Witnesses at the door she's my lesbian sex slave, and to my mother she's Jewish and that's all that matters." -- Denise McCanles

"The world will be saved by women. And I think men are basically big sissies." -- Martin Sheen

"I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat." -- Rebecca West

"I'm never sure if I have gender dysphoria or species dysphoria. I often try to explain that I'm really a starfish trapped in a human body and I'm very new to your planet." -- Patrick Califia

"Feminism means you believe in gender equality and social justice, so it's pretty telling when people are reviled by that word." -- Janeane Garofalo

Random/Revolutionary

"I went to a Catholic boarding school and, the way I see it, it was either become a nun or a dominatrix." -- Mistress Ursula, as quoted here

"One thing... ought to be every human being's birthright - namely, a beloved person to share cookies with before turning in to bed." -- Yi-Fu Tuan

"Time is not found in dead clocks and inert calenders, time is life itself: in ocean tides and the blood in the womb, in every self-respecting child, in the land itself, in every spirited protest for diversity and every refusal to let another enslave your time, in the effervescent gusto of carnival life; life reveling in rebellion against the clock." -- Jay Griffiths

"At the end of life you may close your eyes saying, 'I have not been dominated by the Dominant Idea of my age; I have mine own allegiance, and served it.'" -- Voltairine de Cleyre

"Polite conversation is rarely either." -- Fran Lebowitz

"When you find peace within yourself, you become the kind of person who can live at peace with others." -- Peace Pilgrim (1908-1981)

"The distinction between the past, the present, and the future is only an illusion." -- Albert Einstein

"Imagination is the one weapon in the war against reality." -- Jules de Gaultier

"Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house." -- Jules-Henri Poincare

"We are all of us all the time coming together and falling apart. The point is, we are not rocks. Who wants to be one anyway, impermeable, unchanging, our history already played out..." -- John Rosenthal

"This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek." -- Terry Tempest Williams

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein

"The efford to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." -- Steven Weinberg

"It is better to have loafed and lost than never to have loafed at all." -- James Thurber

"The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth." -- Neils Bohr

"To be revolutionary is to be original, to know where we came from, to validate what is ours and help it to flourish, the best of what is ours, of our beginnings, our principles, and to leave behind what no longer serves us." -- Ines Hernandez, U.S. Chicana political activist

"You've got to get people to believe that change is possible... You have to show that you can fight things successfully - even if you don't win." -- Winona LaDuke

"Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature - the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter." -- Rachel Carson

"I love America because it is a confused, chaotic mess - and I hope we can keep it this way for at least another thousand years. The permissive society is the free society, the open society. Who gave us permission to live this way? Nobody did. We did. And that's the way it should be - only more so. The best cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy." -- Edward Abbey

"The challenge to humanity, then, is this: We must become heroes, or be made slaves." -- Kristian Williams, The Progressive March 2003

"You know the majority always try to eat the minority everywhere." -- Saifullah Jan, Kalasha representative

"Whether our grandchildren will feel pride or shame will be determined by whether we become the first great empire to have higher ambitions than to be a great empire." -- Richard Rorty

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." -- Eleanor Roosevelt

"Technologies which are environmentally more sustainable are less prone to being hijacked by those intent on harm. No terrorist is going to make governments tremble by threatening to bomb a wind turbine, or release clouds of compost over our cities." -- Jonathon Porritt

"The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself." -- David Orr

"The danger of censorship in the United States is less from business or the religious right or the self-righteous left than from the self-censorship of artists themselves, who simply give up. If we can't see a way to get our story told, what is the point of trying? I wonder how many fine, inspiring ideas are strangled in the womb of the imagination because there's no way past the gates of commerce." -- Frank Pierson

"Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn." -- Garrison Keillor

"Harry Potter has done an amazing thing, in that people are reading again. Fantasy and sci-fi can really open that door for people. I love all that stuff and I'm praying that magic is real. J.K. Rowling said it's not real, but, God, I really want to believe that it is." -- Amber Benson

"The most important act of peacemaking? Your next one. Few of us will ever be called on to do great things, but all of us can do small things in a great way." -- Colman McCarthy

"It isn't just pop culture and fast food that is creating a monoculture across the planet... there is at least one other great destructive force at work globally, and this is the American management model. Leaders everywhere, no matter what their tradition or culture, are pressured to focus on numeric measures of efficiency and narrow measures of success, i.e. growth and profit-making... As these too-narrow measures roll out around the world, they create the conditions for large-scale destruction of cultures, habitats, and the human spirit." -- Margaret J. Wheatley

"The problem with being punctual is that nobody's there to appreciate it." -- Franklin P. Adams

"Erase the lines: I pray you not to love classifications: The thing is like a river, from source to sea-mouth. One flowing life." -- Robinson Jeffers

"If you listen to a lot of conservatives, they'll tell you that the difference between them and us is that conservatives love America and liberals hate America... They don't get it. We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America the way a 4-year-old loves her mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticzes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad, and helping your loved one grow. Love takes attention and work and is the best thing in the world." -- Al Franken

"You know, the courts may not be working anymore, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done." -- Marge Simpson

"The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling -- their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We may be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." -- Arundhati Roy

"The only way for me to think, and therefore, act productively, is to view the people I have encountered as local - far away perhaps, but nevertheless my neighbors." -- Elizabeth Whelan

"So many people in recent centuries worship the sky at the expense of the earth, mind at the expense of body, and women are scapegoated as the carnal ones, the less-than-holy flesh. While the talents of intellect, of creativity, of determination, of strength are shared equally between men and women, the power to carry, birth, and nurse is not." -- Caroline Ailanthus

"No sight that human eyes can look upon is more provocative of awe than is the night sky scattered thick with stars." -- Llewelyn Powys

"We know that there are Zapatistas elsewhere in Mexico, that there are Zapatistas all over the world. We are everywhere." -- Village Leader in Oventic, Mexico

"I can't help but think that at the end of your life, when you look back, there'll be a tone. And that tone will come from the essence of how you live your day-to-day - what you did in between that time - because that is really your life." -- Richard Linklater

"Johnny Cash's voice - the only voice besides James Earl Jones' that could credibly pass for God's." -- Madelyn Rosenberg

"Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by their stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle." -- E.M. Forster

"First, I thought my life's work was psychology. And then I thought my life's work was psychadelics. Then I thought my life's work was bringing eastern philosophy to the West. Now... whatever I'm doing now is my life's work, even if it's sitting by the window." -- Ram Dass

"No time: the chronic complaint. No time to question the validity of the two-hour commute. No time to prepare a meal that isn't prepackaged. No time to nurture relationships, let alone a garden or an art. The army and religious cult leaders have long known the value of sleep deprivation in the indoctrination process. Physically and mentally weakened, deprived of time for reflection, are we more vulnerable to manipulation and control? Is the overworked society more susceptible to its own propaganda? Has leisure become radical?" -- Deborah Campbell

"Freedom is available, the trick is to stop looking out there for it, and to sit down, shut up, and see for yourself that your truest nature, however deeply buried or obscured, is closer to love than anything else." -- Noah Levine

"I know the basics. I know we have a dip-shit for a President. I know we have a new enemy every day... America's a fucked-up place." -- Ian Bavitz

"There is dissent over the projects of globalization all over the world. Those above, who globalize conformism, cynicism, stupidity, war, destruction and death. And those below who globalize rebellion, hope, creativity, intelligence, imagination, life, memory and the construction of a world that we can all fit in, a world with democracy, liberty and justice." -- Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos

"Information is the currency of democracy." -- Thomas Jefferson

"It is not depravity that afflicts the human race so much as a general lack of intelligence." -- Agnes Repplier, American writer and social critic (1858-1950)

"If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." -- George Orwell

"To preserve the freedom of the human mind... and freedom of the press, every spirit should be ready to devote itself to martyrdom; for as long as we may think as we will and speak as we think, the condition of man will proceed in improvement." -- Thomas Jefferson