“You’re saying, no, state said two kinds of marriage; the full marriage, and then this sort of skim-milk marriage.”

An operatic voice is like no other.

As women achieve power, the barriers will fall.

I think the notion that we have all the democracy that money can buy strays so far from what our democracy is supposed to be.

I ask no favor for my sex. All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

If I had any talent God could give me, I would be a great diva.

It is not women’s liberation, it is women’s and men’s liberation.

So that’s the dissenter’s hope: that they are writing not for today but for tomorrow.

It’s great to be in the position of asking questions and not having to answer questions.

Don’t be distracted by emotions like anger, envy, resentment. These just zap energy and waste time.

My rule was I will not answer a question that attempts to project how I will rule in a case that might come before the court.

Yet what greater defeat could we suffer than to come to resemble the forces we oppose in their disrespect for human dignity?

So often in life, things that you regard as an impediment turn out to be great, good fortune.

You can disagree without being disagreeable.

The written argument endures. The oral argument is fleeting.

I just try to do the good job that I have to the best of my ability and I really don’t think about whether I’m inspirational. I just do the best I can.

In every good marriage, it helps sometimes to be a little deaf.

I would say except when I have been attacked the black community has seldom seen fit to even mention the gay aspect. And since when I have been attacked I have usually been defended by the black community,

I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed, gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.

Today, blacks are no longer the litmus paper or the barometer of social change. Blacks are in every segment of society and there are laws that help to protect them from racial discrimination.

The single most important thing you can do politically for gay rights is to come out. Not to write a letter to your congressman but to come out.

Yes, the Boy Scouts of America should definitely allow gay adult leaders and I think it’s really going to hold them back if they don’t.

If people do not organize in the name of their interest, the world will not take them as being serious. And that is the chief reason that every person who is gay should join some gay organization. Because he must prove to the world that he cares about his own freedom.

There were a lot of Romneys. There’s the Romney who was going to be better on gay rights than Ted Kennedy; now there’s a Romney who checks with Rick Santorum on that issue.

You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend, the economist Julianne Malveaux, says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.