Top 100 Dan Savage Quotes
#1. The kind of relationship I had with my mother didn't make me gay. I had that kind of relationship with my mother because I was gay.
Dan Savage
#2. There are so many people out there with less shame talking about their problems.
Dan Savage
#3. Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn't, 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' In every possible sense.
Dan Savage
#4. Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.
Dan Savage
#5. Now that all writers everywhere are contractually obligated to blog and tweet all day long, who has time to work on a book?
Dan Savage
#6. I own a lot of my house, because I'm Irish and from people who never owned anything.
Dan Savage
#7. I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism
Dan Savage
#8. You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they're being bullied.
Dan Savage
#9. A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.
Dan Savage
#10. 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.
Dan Savage
#11. Relationships are monuments build on lies
Dan Savage
#13. 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. I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
Dan Savage
#14. 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.
Dan Savage
#15. When I was in high school I got involved in the fringe theater scene in Chicago, and I met some openly gay people. I could see that it got better, that they were happy and loved and supported. I saw with my own eyes that it got better.
Dan Savage
#16. I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.
Dan Savage
#17. Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don't know and can't articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.
Dan Savage
#18. A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.
Dan Savage
#19. Every relationship you are in will fail, until one doesn't
Dan Savage
#20. 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.
Dan Savage
#21. Most Americans don't care about gay marriage.
Dan Savage
#22. If what you want is a life where your homosexuality is not an issue, move, as many have done.
Dan Savage
#23. Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It's still better than high school.
Dan Savage
#24. The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.
Dan Savage
#25. When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.
Dan Savage
#26. I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already really good.
Dan Savage
#27. 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.
Dan Savage
#28. Really, when it comes to gay rights, there's two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.
Dan Savage
#29. 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.
Dan Savage
#30. I don't think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.
Dan Savage
#31. One man's piss-soaked sadomasochistic orgy is another man's poetic ecstasy.
Dan Savage
#32. 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.
Dan Savage
#33. I didn't want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.
Dan Savage
#34. I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It's gratifying, but it's almost like doing radio. It's ephemeral.
Dan Savage
#35. I think astrology is annoying bullshit-which is so Libra of me
Dan Savage
#36. 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.
Dan Savage
#37. 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.
Dan Savage
#38. My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he'd met when I came out to him were corpses.
Dan Savage
#39. Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.
Dan Savage
#40. I think abortion should be mandatory for about 30 years,
Dan Savage
#41. No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.
Dan Savage
#42. Don't mistake being an asshole for being a man.
Dan Savage
#43. The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.
Dan Savage
#44. To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It's in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.
Dan Savage
#45. Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.
Dan Savage
#47. So I don't feel particularly wealthy-but, you know, I pay my taxes and I know that I am.
Dan Savage
#48. I'm a lesbian and I'd rather you bully me than a thirteen-year-old kid.
Dan Savage
#49. I don't understand how real Christians let that little f
ker get away with that.
Dan Savage
#50. Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there's no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.
Dan Savage
#51. The truly revolutionary promise of our nation's founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.
Dan Savage
#52. 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.
Dan Savage
#53. 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.
Dan Savage
#54. To be a straight person and discover you're infertile is almost like discovering you're not a straight person.
Dan Savage
#55. 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.
Dan Savage
#56. Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes
Dan Savage
#57. Books are magic: you never know where they're going to end up.
Dan Savage
#58. One man's blasphemy doesn't override other people's free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.
Dan Savage
#59. I don't like to think about what school was like for me.
Dan Savage
#60. 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.
Dan Savage
#61. I wouldn't say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they're certainly exploited and mined by them.
Dan Savage
#62. When you're young and queer and closeted, you can end up in this place where you regard your straight peers as the enemy.
Dan Savage
#63. I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.
Dan Savage
#64. Today's unspeakable perversion is tomorrow's kink, is next week's good clean fun
Dan Savage
#65. 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.
Dan Savage
#66. Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.
Dan Savage
#67. 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.'
Dan Savage
#68. Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.
Dan Savage
#69. 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.
Dan Savage
#71. In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits - a floor, not a ceiling. It's enforceable.
Dan Savage
#72. We all have our scars. That's what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.
Dan Savage
#73. I get letters every year from women who think Valentine's Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.
Dan Savage
#74. I don't write about my life in my column.
Dan Savage
#75. You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.
Dan Savage
#76. I wanted to be a priest when I was a kid.
Dan Savage
#77. You know, my problem is I can't say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.
Dan Savage
#78. 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.
Dan Savage
#79. 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.
Dan Savage
#80. How did people raise kids before plastic came along? "Everything for Baby", said the sign over the aisle we were in. It should have said, "Everything for Baby Is Made from Molded Plastic in Ugly Primary Colors.
Dan Savage
#81. Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.
Dan Savage
#82. Is it adultery if I'm committing it at one end of a guy and he's committing it at the other end of that same guy?
Dan Savage
#83. I think the 'South Park' guys are brilliant.
Dan Savage
#84. There's going to be some places where you're treated with respect and dignity and some places where you'd have to be a fool to live, .. So, there will be places where people can get their hair done well and places where they can't.
Dan Savage
#85. The Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.
Dan Savage
#86. It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.
Dan Savage
#87. Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America - as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.
Dan Savage
#88. 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.
Dan Savage
#89. I believe it's in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.
Dan Savage
#90. I don't think it's the responsibility of gays and lesbians to reinvent the family.
Dan Savage
#91. The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.
Dan Savage
#92. I'm allergic to dogs, so I couldn't even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.
Dan Savage
#93. I am not an idiot, and I'm not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.
Dan Savage
#94. Shouldn't homophobic politicians and anti-gay bullies be presumed to be gay until they get caught up in a straight sex scandal?
Dan Savage
#95. Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where's that going to get 'em? Besides divorce court?
Dan Savage
#96. The cultural expectation should be if there's infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.
Dan Savage
#97. I don't think that gay and lesbian relationships are identical to heterosexual relationships. I do think that heterosexual weddings, or at least most of them, are sort of camp pantomimes about male and female sex roles, even if the couple is marrying as individuals and equals ...
Dan Savage
#98. 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.
Dan Savage
#99. How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they're somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?
Dan Savage
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