Damon Galgut Quotes

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

When I was running for speaker, people would go out of their way to point out why I wasn't going to win: 'You're a woman, you're too liberal, you're gay, you're from the West Side of Manhattan,' which in that context was an insult.

I felt like I was an outsider growing up in the black church, as a gay man, in a poor community.

For many gay and bisexual men of color, economic inequalities add to the pernicious effects of oppression and homophobia.

Growing up as a gay boy in West Texas, I definitely felt like a bit of an outcast sometimes - that there was a world that I would never be a part of.

For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.

Society is better off without certain people.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

Afghan women, as a group, I think their suffering has been equaled by very few other groups in recent world history.

Our main reasons for fearing males having sex with males is that you really had to construct a more powerful social role to keep men in their place than you did to keep women in their place.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

The feeling of being an underdog, not belonging, is very much me. You harbour a little feeling of resentment towards the 'upper dog'.

My mom knew early on that I was gay, and she knew that I had to get out of the ghetto.

I think being a woman is like being Irish. Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the same.

In today's Britain, the weakest among us are often assumed to be minority communities. In fact, the weakest are those minorities-within-minorities for whom the legal right to exit from their communities' constraints amounts to nothing before the enforcement of cultural and religious shaming.

As a gay person, my life has been marginalized.

All my life, the naysayers have told me that I can't win because I'm a progressive... because I'm a woman... even because I'm a lesbian.

Many people secretly think that gays are a lot happier than they are, and want to punish them.

I'm happy to say that I'm a lesbian in the world. I know there are people who don't want to be called women comedians, but I think it gives a path to the fact that we live in extremely patriarchal times.

Underneath the conservative popular base is the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted of other races and other colors, the unemployed and the unemployable. They exist outside the democratic process; their life is the most immediate and the most real need for ending intolerable conditions and institutions.

If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of the half of society over which the other half has power—from the exercises of the right of the strongest.

Beyond fashion, I think that culture has a side where they love to shoot you up like a clay pigeon and then take out their rifles. I lived that, and I got to see the perspective from up in the sky.

There are some good traditions in our culture, one of which is that men dance with women. Soon we will reach the stage where we will all have to publicly apologise for being heterosexual.

Arab society features apartheid of women, apartheid of homosexuals, and apartheid of Christians, Jews, and democracy.