When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

I enjoy being around people who disagree with me; and I enjoy being in non-political contexts and activities.

Although I never publicly defended promiscuity, I never publicly attacked it. I attempted to avoid the subject, in part because I felt, and often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.

If you are a gay couple living in Alabama, you know one thing: your family has no standing under the law; and it can and will be violated by strangers.

Homosexuality is like the weather. It just is.

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

The most successful marriages, gay or straight, even if they begin in romantic love, often become friendships. It's the ones that become the friendships that last.

The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they're called Republicans.

Al Gore's problem, in my view, is that he never liked politics. He's actually deeply uncomfortable in it but felt he had to do it because of his father. He's much more comfortable in a private sector role and has, in fact, been much more successful in a private sector role, and I admire him for that.

Anything that raises any internal honesty about gay life is inherently suspect.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things.

I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.

I've always been a pretty candid person. I'm not a very secretive person; I'm not a very discreet person. One of my best friends once described me as pathologically indiscreet.

The good news about me is that my friends and social network is entirely independent of politics.

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.

There is something about hearing your president affirm your humanity that you don't know what effect it has until you hear it.

Well, in the past, the size of government was one of the more fundamental dividing lines between Right and Left. The Right was supposed to represent the small government philosophy - limited spending, low taxes. Obviously, things have shifted.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

When I first started talking about gay marriage, most people in the gay community looked at me as if I was insane or possibly a fascist reactionary.

When I was about eight, I asked my mother if it was true that God knows everything about you. When she answered yes, I said, 'Then there's no hope for me, Mum.'

Homophobia the fear that another man will treat you like you treat women.

Homophobia whether internalized or externalized is really fear its not hatred its fear. Its fear of the truth about ourselves.

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

As far as I know, only a small minority of mathematicians, even of those with Platonist views, accept the idea that there may be mathematical facts which are true but unknowable.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

I voted for the Defense of Marriage Act but I do not believe we should institutionalize a form of discrimination against any minority by amending the Constitution.

Invention consists in avoiding the constructing of useless contraptions and in constructing the useful combinations which are in infinite minority.

The third-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the majority. The second-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking with the minority. The first-rate mind is only happy when it is thinking.

When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else.

Truth always originates in a minority of one, and every custom begins as a broken precedent.

In his years in Washington, Senator Kerry has been one vote of a hundred in the United States Senate - and fortunately on matters of national security he was very often in the minority.

If you want to be a government in a minority Parliament, you have to work with other people.

Historically, the judicial branch has often been the sole protector of the rights of minority groups against the will of the popular majority.

Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles.

The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint, upon the advice and consent of a majority of the Senate, and it plainly does not give a minority of senators any right to interfere with that process.

The Sixth Sense is not a good white film. Insomnia is not a good white film. They're just good films. So why we can't we have good films that happen to have black people, or Asian, or Latino, or any other minority group in them?

When you belong to a minority, you have to be better in order to have the right to be equal.

Your political system is actually too democratic. The fact that Americans vote on every bill and proposition can prolong bigotry indefinitely, especially where it is aimed at minority groups.

In recurring episodes over the next couple of decades, the minority view gradually won. A profusion of factors differentiates each case from the others, including naked partisanship on both sides, but the trend has been clear.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure.

Many are called but few are chosen. There are sayings of Christ which suggest that the Church he came to establish will always be a minority affair.