Harvey Milk Quotes

If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.

The fact is that more people have been slaughtered in the name of religion than for any other single reason. That, that my friends, that is true perversion!

It takes no compromise to give people their rights...it takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.

All young people, regardless of sexual orientation or identity, deserve a safe and supportive environment in which to achieve their full potential.

All men are created equal. Now matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. That is what America is about.

I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you...And you...And you...Gotta give em hope.

Hope will never be silent.

Burst down those closet doors once and for all, and stand up and start to fight.

I know you can't live on hope alone; but without hope, life is not worth living. So you, and you and you: you got to give them hope; you got to give them hope.

Rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.

It's not my victory, it's yours and yours and yours. If a gay can win, it means there is hope that the system can work for all minorities if we fight. We've given them hope.

Politics is theater. It doesn't matter if you win. You make a statement. You say, "I'm here, pay attention to me

Every gay person must come out. As difficult as it is, you must tell your immediate family. You must tell your relatives. You must tell your friends if indeed they are your friends. You must tell the people you work with. You must tell the people in the stores you shop in. Once they realize that we are indeed their children, that we are indeed everywhere, every myth, every lie, every innuendo will be destroyed once and all. And once you do, you will feel so much better

Hope is never silent.

You’ve gotta give them hope. If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door

When I was 13 years old, my beautiful mother and my father moved me from a conservative Mormon home in San Antonio, Texas, to California, and I heard the story of Harvey Milk. And it gave me hope. It gave me the hope to live my life; it gave me the hope that one day I could live my life openly as who I am and that maybe even I could fall in love and one day get married. Most of all, if Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he'd want me to say to all of the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by their churches, or by the government, or by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value. And that no matter what everyone tells you, God does love you, and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights federally across this great nation of ours.

Never take an elevator in city hall.

Let me have my tax money go for my protection and not for my prosecution. Let my tax money go for the protection of me. Protect my home, protect my streets, protect my car, protect my life, protect my property...worry about becoming a human being and not about how you can prevent others from enjoying their lives because of your own inability to adjust to life.

The only thing they have to look forward to is hope. And you have to give them hope. Hope for a better world, hope for a better tomorrow, hope for a better place to come to if the pressures at home are too great. Hope that all will be all right. Without hope, not only gays, but the blacks, the seniors, the handicapped, the us'es, the us'es will give up. And if you help elect to the central committee and other offices, more gay people, that gives a green light to all who feel disenfranchised, a green light to move forward. It means hope to a nation that has given up, because if a gay person makes it, the doors are open to everyone. So if there is a message I have to give, it is that if I've found one overriding thing about my personal election, it's the fact that if a gay person can be elected, it's a green light. And you and you and you, you have to give people hope....

Gay brothers and sisters,... You must come out. Come out... to your parents... I know that it is hard and will hurt them but think about how they will hurt you in the voting booth! Come out to your relatives... come out to your friends... if indeed they are your friends. Come out to your neighbors... to your fellow workers... to the people who work where you eat and shop... come out only to the people you know, and who know you. Not to anyone else. But once and for all, break down the myths, destroy the lies and distortions. For your sake. For their sake. For the sake of the youngsters who are becoming scared by the votes from Dade to Eugene.

Go after her. Fuck, don’t sit there and wait for her to call, go after her because that’s what you should do if you love someone, don’t wait for them to give you a sign cause it might never come, don’t let people happen to you, don’t let me happen to you, or her, she’s not a fucking television show or tornado. There are people I might have loved had they gotten on the airplane or run down the street after me or called me up drunk at four in the morning because they need to tell me right now and because they cannot regret this and I always thought I’d be the only one doing crazy things for people who would never give enough of a fuck to do it back or to act like idiots or be entirely vulnerable and honest and making someone fall in love with you is easy and flying 3000 miles on four days notice because you can’t just sit there and do nothing and breathe into telephones is not everyone’s idea of love but it is the way I can recognize it because that is what I do. Go scream it and be with her in meaningful ways because that is beautiful and that is generous and that is what loving someone is, that is raw and that is unguarded, and that is all that is worth anything, really.

Let's make no mistake about this: The American Dream starts with the neighborhoods. If we wish to rebuild our cities, we must first rebuild our neighborhoods. And to do that, we must understand that the quality of life is more important than the standard of living. To sit on the front steps--whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city--and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color. ... And I hardly need to tell you that in the 19- or 24-inch view of the world, cleanliness has long since eclipsed godliness. Soon we'll all smell, look, and actually be laboratory clean, as sterile on the inside as on the out. The perfect consumer, surrounded by the latest appliances. The perfect audience, with a ringside seat to almost any event in the world, without smell, without taste, without feel--alone and unhappy in the vast wasteland of our living rooms. I think that what we actually need, of course, is a little more dirt on the seat of our pants as we sit on the front stoop and talk to our neighbors once again, enjoying the type of summer day where the smell of garlic travels slightly faster than the speed of sound.

We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets

You beg for crumbs, you get less crumbs.

In 2008, Van Sant finally made Milk, his award-winning Harvey Milk biopic. Sean Penn starred instead of Robin Williams, while the role of Cleve Jones, which Van Sant had earmarked for River, was taken by Emile Hirsch, who was just eight years old when River died.

The more people open their hearts to us, the less we will have to fight for our rights.

Massage (A Very Special Type of Attention) Lavish your toddler with loving touch! Touch is a rich “food” for growth. Your toddler could easily live without milk, but he’d be scarred for life without loving touch. (I agree with the noted psychologist Virginia Satir, who said we all need four hugs a day for survival, eight to stay calm, and twelve to grow stronger.)

Carter, like almost everyone else in the Temple who got to know Milk, grew to like him immensely: “Before him, all I knew about gays were that some of them were bears and others were queens. But Harvey became a friend of mine, and I went to his house and spent time with him and his partner and realized that a gay couple was just that, a couple. See, that was something good about the Temple—if you were part of it, you always had the opportunity to grow as a person, to be around and learn to accept, to appreciate, all different kinds of people.

In Taiwan as in Shanghai, as well as in Rio, Moscow, Jakarta, and Beirut, the same global gay icons appear in gay-friendly cafés and bookstores and on the walls of LGBT organizations. On five continents, I see Harvey Milk, Lady Gaga, Elton John, Ricky Martin, and, of course, the two Brokeback Mountain cowboys everywhere. There’s even a Brokeback Mountain Café in the gay Chapinero neighborhood of Bogotá.

Hope will never be silent

Giving your baby extra milk won’t make her any healthier, but the more touches and hugs she gets, the stronger and happier she’ll become!

The freedom that so many LGBT people now enjoy is based on centuries of sacrifice and success. Enlightenment thinkers questioned why leaders criminalised sexual identity. Some psychologists fought to define homosexuality as a normal part of life rather than a mental illness. Activists, artists and politicians spoke out, even when faced with the risk of humiliation and violence. David Hockney treated homosexuality expressly in his paintings, and James Baldwin bravely shared the isolation of being gay in a heterosexual world. Drag queens at the Stonewall Inn said they would not accept oppression any longer, and defied policemen who carried clubs and guns. Harvey Milk campaigned for gay rights in San Francisco, and was murdered. Each of these people has honoured the memory of the LGBT people who came before them, usually in a world that was harsher and less accepting of difference. From the gay men burned at the stake during the Middle Ages to those eliminated by the Nazis and to the LGBT men and women living in oppression in parts of the world today, progress is never even or permanent.

Harvey makes a contemplative grumbling noise while scrubbing at his beard. “Well, you could try milking the male goat. But that might get weird.

She looked over his shoulder at a picture of him shaking hands with Harvey Milk in San Francisco three days before the politician’s death. Her goosebumps intensified. Her grandpa had done so much with his life. He’d interviewed every important American political actor in his storied career. People questioned her about him in hushed tones in New York City. Sometimes she forgot his achievements. To her, he was just her grandpa. But right now he was looking at her like an interview subject. It made her squirm

History treats kindly the courage of Jesus, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi, Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., Harvey Milk, and, to a general degree, the millions of women who contested the patriarchy, but their own communities and contemporaries killed them for it.

Next to Alma on our All Saints’ table was an icon of another accidental saint, Harvey Milk (the first openly gay person elected to public office in California, who was shot to death by a fellow city employee in 1978). The icon showed Milk standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge with five silver bullet holes in his chest and a golden halo behind his head. The icon was created by Bill, one of our congregation’s artists, who called me later when someone challenged him for creating a visual representation of sainthood for someone who was not Christian. I explained to Bill that what we celebrate in the saints is not their piety or perfection but the fact that we believe in a God who gets redemptive and holy things done in this world through, of all things, human beings, all of whom are flawed.