Judith Butler Quotes

Coming out is the most political thing you can do.

Just by the nature of making the choice to be true to who I am, I'm political. Sometimes that's all you need to do: Show up and be black, gay and Christian in America and actually say it out loud. And refuse to let anything or anybody take that away from you.

A triumph of consciousness-raising has been the homosexual hijacking of the word 'gay.'

You just have to find your activism, and don't let anyone tell you what that should look like. If you're doing the work, and you're getting someone to think, you're on the right path.

Our society really needs to take a better look at what we're selling, because I think women being empowered will be as beneficial to men as it is to us.

I feel nowadays that both women and men are embracing their individuality rather than being defined by gender roles.

Poetry is my politics. It's an opportunity that gives me a way to speak.

When you look at the homosexual agenda, I cannot support something that I believe brings nothing but self-destruction, not only physically but of their soul.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .

I want to continue to speak out on issues that matter to me. I want to have even more of a voice.

We need to create the institutions that will support the society we want to live in. The only answer is collective action.

We are at a time in our country's history that inclusive language is better than exclusive language.

One challenge of our adventure on earth is to rise above dead systems...wars, nations, destructions...to refuse to be a part of them, and express the highest selves we know how to be.

How can I find the words? Poets have taken them all and left me with nothing to say or do" "Except to teach me for the first time what they meant.

The anxiety of fate is conquered by the self-affirmation of the individual as an infinitely significant microcosmic representation of the universe .

I also have to speak out for people around me who are afraid, who think it is not worth it or who have totally given up hope. So I want to set an example: you can do it and this is OK, to speak out.

I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

In truth we need to change the society itself, men as well as women, to change everything.

Every human being is an artist, a freedom being, called to participate in transforming and reshaping the conditions, thinking and structures that shape and inform our lives

I met people on college campuses who were defining themselves as genderqueer to express revolutionary feelings, or to communicate their individuality; they were gender fluid without being gender dysphoric. This phenomenon may be culturally significant, but it has only a little bit in common with the people who feel they can have no authentic self in their birth gender.

For me, makeup is about being your best self. If I wake up in a foul mood and have to deal with temper tantrums and an exploding diaper--I know taking 10 minutes to get my game face on will reset my stress levels. It's a chance to check in and remind myself--you got this.

If whites would vote their economic interests, not their racial fears, we the people who have the most need for change have the power to bring about that change nonviolently.

People need to know what's going on. People need to wake up.

Socialism is the preparation for that higher Anarchism; painfully, laboriously we mean to destroy false ideas of property and self, eliminate unjust laws and poisonous and hateful suggestions and prejudices, create a system of social right-dealing and a tradition of right-feeling and action. Socialism is the schoolroom of true and noble Anarchism, wherein by training and restraint we shall make free men.