“God does not require us to achieve any of the good tasks that humanity must pursue. What God requires of us is that we not stop trying.”

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.

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.

There is nowhere you can go and only be with people who are like you. Give it up.

If the society today allows wrongs to go unchallenged, the impression is created that those wrongs have the approval of the majority.

The world cannot continue to wage war like physical giants and to seek peace like intellectual pygmies

We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.

Justice of right is always to take precedence over might.

Peace has its victories no less than war, but it doesn’t have as many monuments to unveil.

A world of vested interests is not a world which welcomes the disruptive force of candor.

We are tethered to our kind, and may as well join hands in the struggle.