Top 56 Charles M. Blow Quotes
#1. You don't become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference.
Charles M. Blow
#2. Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.
Charles M. Blow
#3. Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.
Charles M. Blow
#4. The internet is ruthless. And people are very, very happy to let you know when they don't like something.
Charles M. Blow
#5. While the word 'bisexual' was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.
Charles M. Blow
#6. Equality must be won - by every generation - because it will never be freely granted.
Charles M. Blow
#8. I know that life, I've done all those things, and I can still tell you that just being you is perfectly fine.
Charles M. Blow
#9. Different is not deviant, no matter what the world may say. You have the moral obligation to love yourself.
Charles M. Blow
#10. It would only be in the cold gaze of hindsight that I would be able to comprehend that while in flight from pain, I became an agent of it.
Charles M. Blow
#11. Look at it this way: this administration is taking unprecedented steps to make sure that the government's secrets remain private while simultaneously invading the privacy of its citizens ... Many innocents must be violated so that a few guilty people can be stopped. It's a digital stop-and-frisk ...
Charles M. Blow
#12. My mother was a stout woman with a man's name - Billie. She was plain-faced with honest eyes - no black grease by the lash line, no blue powder on the lids, eyebrows not plucked up high and thin.
Charles M. Blow
#13. Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.
Charles M. Blow
#14. I write a lot about disadvantaged people, particularly vulnerable children, because I feel that that's who I was. That is familiar terrain for me. And I try to write about things that are very close to me because I want people to feel the passion that I have for the subject.
Charles M. Blow
#15. We all have the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it
Charles M. Blow
#16. Being a world leader is less about destiny than focused determination, and it is there that we have faltered.
Charles M. Blow
#17. A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it's really hard to catch.
Charles M. Blow
#18. I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth--that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.
Charles M. Blow
#19. One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.
Charles M. Blow
#20. Elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want.
Charles M. Blow
#21. Conservatism is rooted in preservation; progressivism advances alteration. These are different love languages. These languages turn on your view of change itself: When you think of America, do you see a country struggling to be maintained or one striving to be made better?
Charles M. Blow
#23. This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn't lost, that their destiny is victory.
Charles M. Blow
#24. You don't have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.
Charles M. Blow
#25. We don't vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.
Charles M. Blow
#27. Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.
Charles M. Blow
#28. No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner.
Charles M. Blow
#29. But they were different. Weary, not sweet. The skin above Jed's eyes fell soft, releasing the worries before they could stick.
Charles M. Blow
#31. I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.
Charles M. Blow
#32. I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.
Charles M. Blow
#33. America is a living idea. It isn't only the tenets of its founding, but also the terms of its future. Every day, we make America. Seeking to preserve and enshrine one vision of this country from one period of its past robs it of what makes it magical: its infinite possibility for adjustment.
Charles M. Blow
#34. I had set about trying to make myself more polished than a country boy would be.
Charles M. Blow
#35. It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.
Charles M. Blow
#36. It has been my experience that the "hardest" people in the world are actually the most fragile and the most soft-spoken are the strongest ...
Charles M. Blow
#37. My father was short for a man, with a child's plaything for a name - Spinner. He had flawless dark brown skin and a head full of big, wet-looking curls, black as oil. And he had the smile of a scoundrel - the kind of smile that disarmed men and undressed women.
Charles M. Blow
#39. I would harness the truths that had been trapped in me like a fire shut up in my bones. I would give my life over to my passions, my writing, and my children, and they would breathe life back into me.
Charles M. Blow
#40. It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
Charles M. Blow
#41. But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being wiling to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.
Charles M. Blow
#42. There can be moments in your life where you may feel attracted to someone depending on circumstance, depending on the person of one gender or another, and sometimes where that is less of an influence in your life.
Charles M. Blow
#43. An illustration is a visual editorial - it's just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.
Charles M. Blow
#44. One doesn't have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.
Charles M. Blow
#45. I'm trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture - particularly in black male culture - and to help people to see that there's room enough for everyone.
Charles M. Blow
#46. What too few people mention when discussing crime is the degree to which concentrated poverty, hopelessness and despair are the chambermaids of violence and incivility.
Charles M. Blow
#47. Time ground to a halt and the trees whispered in the language of God and nature about steadfastness and resilience - gently saying that one could be constantly stirred yet not moved, bent but not broken, that a thing well grounded and deeply rooted could ever stand.
Charles M. Blow
#48. I say, seeking to diminish the human dignity of another whose only crime is not loving whom you would have him or her love is immoral and an offense to the indomitable determination of the heart.
Charles M. Blow
#49. Buffalo Soldiers in Italy: Black Americans in World War II
Charles M. Blow
#50. The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.
Charles M. Blow
#51. Great leadership isn't shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.
Charles M. Blow
#53. I have always loved science, but I have always loved the arts - drawing, painting and, yes, writing - more.
Charles M. Blow
#54. There was no hierarchy of humanity.... And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them- these things came into the world with me.
Charles M. Blow
#55. In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.
Charles M. Blow
#56. I was always a relatively quiet and introspective kid.
Charles M. Blow
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