Top 140 Quotes & Sayings by Dan Savage - Page 2

I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.

I'm an agnosto-theist.

Men were never expected to be monogamous.

There's always something new with sex. We lived in a world without Viagra, now we live in a world with Viagra. We lived in a world without blowjobs and anilingus in the Oval Office, and then it happens and you get to write about it. We live in a world where now the government is screwing with contraception and holding back vaccines that could save 4,000 women's lives a year, and you get to write about that. It's not as much fun as anilingus in the Oval Office, but what are you going to do? If you pay attention, there's always something new, and it's always really invigorating.

Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes

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.

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.

And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that 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. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.

Don't mistake being an asshole for being a man.

I'm an agnosto-theist. I cross myself on airplanes. I pray when I'm sick. When you're sick I'll keep you in my thoughts; when I'm sick, I'm entreating a higher power.

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

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.

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.

...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.

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

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

I'm not good looking. I'm very strange - a very bony face on an enormous skull, and I don't like to be naked because I don't like how I look naked. And - no, no. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything. So I could have a lot more trappings of wealth if every time I had 20 extra dollars I didn't pay off more of the mortgage.

My dad and mom were more like World War II-era parents, even though it was the 1960s, because they were both born in the '40s. They were young adults before the '60s even happened, and married, and already having kids. But by the time we were adolescents in the '70s, the whole culture was screaming at parents, "You're a good parent if you're open with your kids about sex." They attempted to be open with us about sex, and it made them want to die, and consequently, it made us want to die.

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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

I always kind of divided the gay guys I met up into two groups when I first started coming out. There were the guys who thought there was something fundamentally wrong with them and hated themselves and were so burdened with shame and internalized homophobia. It just really paralyzed and shredded them. And then there were guys like me who thought, "I'm fine, everybody else is crazy. My church is sick and the family's crazy, but me? I'm fine."

Today's unspeakable perversion is tomorrow's kink, is next week's good clean fun

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

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

A lot of young people regard a threat against one person's sexual freedom as a threat against all of them, and that's absolutely how they should regard it. But it's heartening to look at the polls on young people on gay people, gay marriage, and sexual-freedom issues. They're terrific, and that's why the religious right is so desperately trying to lock in their current bare majority for prejudice: because their constituents are dying. They're losing votes every time the ambulance pulls up to the old folks' home. Let's hope it pulls up a little more frequently.

I'm one of those gay people who's constantly reminded of how fortunate I am to live now and not to be Ennis and Jack [from Brokeback Mountain] or whatever - not that I'd mind being Ennis for half an hour. But it's been so much worse recently. It still is terrible. In Iran, they're hanging gay teenagers. I'm grateful for how far the United States, even with its crazy Christians, has come on a lot of issues. And the fact that I get called a faggot occasionally by a crack addict, while annoying, certainly isn't a lobotomy and prison.

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

Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn't criticize anything gay - if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.

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

Relationships are monuments build on lies

I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years.

the truth is often a mixed message

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

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

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.

I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.

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

Don't move to Seattle and write a stupid sex advice column. That's a waste of time and you need to grow up and get serious.

Oh, my god. I'd be a terrible doctor. I don't like to touch other people. There's a lot of gruesome stuff in my line of work to feel or to admit. I'm sure everyone's expecting me to say "proctologist," but actually no, I don't want to be a proctologist. Probably want to be a dentist, because you don't have to touch much of the other person's body, just their face or mouth.

If kids got raped at Denny's as often as they get raped at church it would be illegal to take your kids to Denny's.

I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism

We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.

I think it's better to have limits. My limits are different from other people's limits. I'm all for freedom, I'm all for people doing what they want. I'm also all for people shouldering the consequences of their behaviors, and not being assholes, and not lying unless they need to, and being honest except when you shouldn't, and being faithful except when it's okay to cheat. I guess I'm just a mass of contradictions.

I think it's going to take three or four generations of gay people being able to get married before it starts feeling less like we're going through these motions, that we're aping a heterosexual institution.

I'm 52, which means I don't really... I was never a person who celebrated birthdays to begin with. At this stage, it's certainly something that someone who made a big deal out of their birthdays in their 20s and 30s kind of hangs that up. Not because you're sad to be getting older. I'm thrilled to be getting older. I have so many friends who died when they were 25 and would be ecstatic to be here with me turning 50. It's a thrill and a privilege to still be alive.

You can’t pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet case to death.

TV commercials make parenting look like there are going to be good days and bad days - like, it'll be this gentle wave, like you'll have a blissed-out, really wonderful day or two, and then, you know, then you'll have an issue. And what parenting is, is kind of earthquake.

I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.

For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn't make them smarter, and it doesn't make us married.

If sex isn't an important part of your marriage, you can't beef if your wife or husband does this unimportant thing with somebody else every once in a while, if you have no interest in it.

Valentine's Day is much more of a holy day of obligation for a guy in a relationship with a woman, because a woman has certain emotional expectations. Even if she doesn't value Valentine's Day, or views it as a corporate exercise, she still often wants her boyfriend or husband to go through the motions, just in case she values it.

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.

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.

Oftentimes, when people write me 4,000-word letters, I write them back and tell them if their problem's that complicated, they probably need a lawyer or a cop, and not me.

There's a big mistake the left has made with talking to religious people, which is attempting to talk them out of their interpretations of the Bible, attempting to have theological debate with them. When I'm on right-wing whackjob radio, when people call up to inform me that I'm going to hell, I concede the point. "I'm going to hell. Yes. Can you leave me alone now?"

We're living through an age of irrationality and religious "fervor" I would call it religious idiocy. It's exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.