“When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being, his very act of protest confers dignity on him.”

Martin Luther King, with whom I worked very closely, became very distressed when a number of the ministers working for him wanted him to dismiss me from his staff because of my homosexuality.

I am a Quaker. And as everyone knows, Quakers, for 300 years, have, on conscientious ground, been against participating in war. I was sentenced to three years in federal prison because I could not religiously and conscientiously accept killing my fellow man.

if I was defended they simply said I had been defended. But I don’t think they have taken any effort at maligning me or maligning gays or making any effort to give to people anything that wasn’t news.

Gays are beginning to realize what blacks learned long ago: Unless you are out here fighting for yourself then nobody else will help you. I think the gay community has a moral obligation to continue the fight.

You have to all combine and fight a head-on battle – in the name of justice and equality – and even that’s going to be difficult. But if we let ourselves get separated so that we’re working for gays or school children or the aged, we’re in trouble.

If we desire a society in which men are brothers, then we must act towards one another with brotherhood. If we can build such a society, then we would have achieved the ultimate goal of human freedom.

The only weapon we have is our bodies, and we need to tuck them in places so wheels don’t turn

My activism did not spring from my being gay, or, for that matter, from my being black. Rather, it is rooted fundamentally in my Quaker upbringing and the values that were instilled in me by my grandparents who reared me.

You have to join every other movement for the freedom of people.

When I say I love Eastland, it sounds preposterous a man who brutalizes people. But you love him or you wouldn’t be here. You’re going to Mississippi to create social change and you love Eastland in your desire to create conditions which will redeem his children.

The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

I believe there are certain types of movements which cannot be married.

Bigotrys birthplace is the sinister back room of the mind where plots and schemes are hatched for the persecution and oppression of other human beings.

If anyone thinks they’re going to get anything out of the Reagan administration for any particular group, they’re wrong!

We are all one – and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.

Both morally and practically, segregation is to me a basic injustice. Since I believe it to be so, I must attempt to remove it.

What we admire we praise; and when we praise, Advance it into notice, that its worth Acknowledged, others may admire it too.

All sympathy not consistent with acknowledged virtue is but disguised selfishness.

The criterion of truth is that it works even if nobody is prepared to acknowledge it.

A brave man acknowledges the strength of others.

The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest.

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

Those who best know human nature will acknowledge most fully what a strength light hearted nonsense give to a hard working man

I abominate a humble man, but yet I love to perceive that a man acknowledges the superiority of my sex, and youth and all that kind of thing. . .