Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

If we don't bear witness as citizens, as people, as individuals, the right that we have had to life is sacrificed. There is a silence, instead of a speaking presence.

The message of women's liberation is that women can love each other and ourselves against our degrading education.

I've never been resigned to ready-made ideas as I was to ready-made clothes, perhaps because although I couldn't sew, I could think.

I believe only in art and failure.

If the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Every artist seems to me to have the job of bearing witness to the world we live in. To some extent I think of all of us as artists, because we have voices and we are each of us unique.

Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression.

People genuinely happy in their choices seem less often tempted to force them on other people than those who feel martyred and broken by their lives.

Morality, like language, is an invented structure for conserving and communicating order. And morality is learned, like language, by mimicking and remembering.

My private measure of success is daily. If this were to be the last day of my life would I be content with it? To live in a harmonious balance of commitments and pleasures is what I strive for.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

Human beings tolerate what they understand they have to tolerate.

Morality is a test of our conformity rather than our integrity.

Love is the terrible secret people are suspected of unless they're married, then one always suspects they don't.

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

Without Liberty, Law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without Law, Liberty also loses its nature and its name, and becomes licentiousness.

We must not enable anyone to impose his personal view regarding religion on others by force, oppression, or pressure.

The oppression of any people for opinion's sake has rarely had any other effect than to fix those opinions deeper, and render them more important.

It is often easier to become outraged by injustice half a world away than by oppression and discrimination half a block from home.

Rap's conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.

Oppression is more easily endured than insult.

Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Minorities have a right to appeal to the Constitution as a shield against such oppression.

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.

The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.

The occupation and robbery of a nation occurs under the illusion of freeing its citizens from brutal oppression.

The situation in the region is flammable and may explode at any moment, because of the crucial events and because of the absence of justice in executing the international legitimacy resolutions, regarding the Israeli Arab cause and the oppression on Palestinians by Israelis.

Many countries persecute their own citizens and intern them in prisons or concentration camps. Oppression is becoming more and more a part of the systems.

Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

Instead, in the absence of respect for human rights, science and its offspring technology have been used in this century as brutal instruments for oppression.

In the final analysis, the incident is seen as originating from an emotional expression of the frustration and anger of the proud people of China who had been subject to ever increasing oppression from without and decadent corruption from within.

I have always striven to raise the voice of hope for a world where hate gives way to respect and oppression to liberation.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

People have got to get together and work together. I'm tired of the kind of oppression that white people have inflicted on us and are still trying to inflict.

The people of Nicaragua were suffering oppression. This made us develop an awareness which eventually led us to commit ourselves to the struggle against the domination of the capitalists of our country in collusion with the U.S. government, i.e. imperialism.

My loathings are simple: stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music.

Our invisibility is the essence of our oppression. And until we eliminate that invisibility, people are going to be able to perpetuate the lies and myths about gay people.

He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself.

Half a world away nations that once lived under oppression and tyranny are now budding democracies due in large part to America 's leadership and the sacrifices of our military.

Refrain at all times from such Foods as cannot be procured without violence and oppression.

Because some people have sex with people of the same sex, an entire culture has been created, broadly speaking, out of oppression. Which in a rational world would not be an issue.

Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.

We have a right, also, in various ways, to act upon our unfavorable opinion of anyone, not to the oppression of his individuality, but in the exercise of ours.

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.

Now I say that with cruelty and oppression it is everybody's business to interfere when they see it.

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

We should feel sorrow, but not sink under its oppression.