Dan Savage famous quotes

We can learn to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about gay people. The same way we have learned to ignore the bullshit in the Bible about shellfish, about slavery, about dinner, about farming, about menstruation, about virginity, about masturbation.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #People #Bullshit

A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.
-- Dan Savage

#Inspirational #Gay #People

every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn't
-- Dan Savage

#Failing

Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.
-- Dan Savage

#Christmas #Real #Ideas

One person simply can’t be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise—and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Femdom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.
-- Dan Savage

#Couple #Long #People

The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.
-- Dan Savage

#School #Kids #Eye

I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already really good.
-- Dan Savage

#Passion #Thinking #Live Your Life

I'm always telling people who say two men can't make a baby: 'Anything is possible for God. I'm going to keep inseminating my husband and keep my fingers crossed.'
-- Dan Savage

#Baby #Husband #Men

You can't pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet-case to death.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Praying #Closets

You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.
-- Dan Savage

#Writing #People #Want

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.
-- Dan Savage

#Children #Couple #Doe

Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?
-- Dan Savage

#Dream #Husband #Divorce

Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.
-- Dan Savage

#Book #Magic #Ends

I don't write about my life in my column.
-- Dan Savage

#Writing #Columns

I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything.
-- Dan Savage

#People #House

In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits - a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable.
-- Dan Savage

#Agreement #Numbers #Adoption

The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.
-- Dan Savage

#War #Slavery #Justified

Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.
-- Dan Savage

#Children #Gay #America

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.
-- Dan Savage

#Girl #Kids #Boys

Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.
-- Dan Savage

#War #Gay #Rights

When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.
-- Dan Savage

#Kids #Gay #Assumption

One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.
-- Dan Savage

#Men #Rights #People

The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.
-- Dan Savage

#Mistake #Men #Expectations

I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.
-- Dan Savage

#Dog #Gay #Men

The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.
-- Dan Savage

#Expectations #Infidelity #Important

Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.
-- Dan Savage

#School #Disease #Life Is

Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.
-- Dan Savage

#Degrees #Fidelity #Obsessed

No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Insecurity #Gone

Shouldn't homophobic politicians and anti-gay bullies be presumed to be gay until they get caught up in a straight sex scandal?
-- Dan Savage

#Sex #Gay #Bully

Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.
-- Dan Savage

#Ice Cream #Guarantees #May

I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.
-- Dan Savage

#Pollyanna #Type

There's going to be some places where you're treated with respect and dignity and some places where you'd have to be a fool to live, .. So, there will be places where people can get their hair done well and places where they can't.
-- Dan Savage

#Hair #People #Done

I think astrology is annoying bullshit-which is so Libra of me
-- Dan Savage

#Thinking #Astrology #Bullshit

I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.
-- Dan Savage

#Kids #Thinking #Cities

Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.
-- Dan Savage

#Children #War #School

I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.
-- Dan Savage

#Happiness #Thinking #Sin

Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
-- Dan Savage

#Religious #Heart #People

A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Tiny #Percentages

The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
-- Dan Savage

#Home #School #Kids

You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.
-- Dan Savage

#School #Kids #Gay

A lot of people are living their lives online in much more public ways with Facebook and Twitter.
-- Dan Savage

#People #Way #Online

Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.
-- Dan Savage

#Hypothetical #Persons

I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.
-- Dan Savage

#Heart #Skins #Thick Skin

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Long #People

I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.
-- Dan Savage

#Valentine #Exercise #Thinking

The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Issues #People

School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.
-- Dan Savage

#School #Goes On #Firsts

Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.
-- Dan Savage

#Children #Adults #Stability

Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir's discourse. There's a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.
-- Dan Savage

#Triumph #Doe #Arms

My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.
-- Dan Savage

#Running #Depressing #Dad

I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them.
-- Dan Savage

#Holiday #Corporations

Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don't know and can't articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #People #Worry

Mother's Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine's Day is a torment if you don't got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine's Day even if we're relatively lucky in love.
-- Dan Savage

#Mother #Valentine #Lucky

One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.
-- Dan Savage

#Men #Poetic #Ecstasy

the truth is often a mixed message
-- Dan Savage

#Messages #Truth Is

The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.
-- Dan Savage

#Promise #Revolutionary #Founding

I don’t understand how real Christians let that little f--ker get away with that.
-- Dan Savage

#Christian #Real #Littles

Take me to the driest county in the most conservative state, and in two hours this determined hedonist will find you all the drugs, whores, and booze you'll need to pass an eventful weekend.
-- Dan Savage

#Weekend #Two #Drug

So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.
-- Dan Savage

#Gun #Owners

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years,
-- Dan Savage

#Thinking #Years #Abortion

The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.
-- Dan Savage

#Mean #Pursuit Of Happiness #Liberty

Kids are like heroin, a little ***** addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.
-- Dan Savage

#Kids #Addiction #Littles

Relationships are monuments build on lies
-- Dan Savage

#Lying #Monument

Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas.
-- Dan Savage

#Texas #Natural

Bisexuals need to recognize that their being closeted is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.
-- Dan Savage

#Needs #Faces #Hostility

...even if gay marriage were legalized there would still be gay men who didn't want to marry, gay men no other gay men would want to marry, and gay men who didn't want to leave the priesthood in order to marry.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Men #Order

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.
-- Dan Savage

#Gun #White #America

the Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
-- Dan Savage

#Reading #Decent #Persons

Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It's not about gender, necessarily.
-- Dan Savage

#Fathers Day #Father #Gender

Is it adultery if I'm committing it at one end of a guy and he's committing it at the other end of that same guy?
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Guy #Adultery

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.
-- Dan Savage

#Teacher #Class #Baking

How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?
-- Dan Savage

#Happiness #America #Promise

Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes
-- Dan Savage

#Should #Brutal #Brutes

But it doesn't matter what you're doing, it matters how you're doing it.
-- Dan Savage

#Matter

I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.
-- Dan Savage

#Children #Believe #Environment

First off, LARDASS, you neglected to include a sign-off, forcing me to create one for you. I tried to create one that captured the spirit and tone of your letter, and I think I did pretty well. []  I am thoroughly annoyed at having my tame statements of fact-being heavy is a health risk; rolls of exposed flesh are unsightly-characterized as “hate speech.” 
-- Dan Savage

#Hate #Thinking #Annoyed

I’m searching for some exit poll data from California. I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Data #California

My husband Terry and I are mostly monogamous. . . . There are times — certain set and limited circumstances — when it is permissible for us to have sex with others.
-- Dan Savage

#Sex #Husband #Certain

I do know this, though: I’m done pretending that the handful of racist gay white men out there—and they’re out there, and I think they’re scum—are a bigger problem for African Americans, gay and straight, than the huge numbers of homophobic African Americans are for gay Americans, whatever their color…I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.
-- Dan Savage

#Gay #Men #Thinking

I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism
-- Dan Savage

#Atheism #Agnostic #Cop