U thru Z

"My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast." - Miguel de Unamuno

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It may be that your whole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others. - Unknown

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Americans keep telling us how successful their system is - then they remind us not to stray too far from our hotel at night. - [Unknown] A European official during the G-8 economic summit in Denver, 1997

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"A very good-looking boy followed me for a quarter of an hour, and in the end he came up to me outside the Opera. I went back with him to his home and he kissed me with a frenzy even on the staircase. I was wildly passionate. We made love like tigers until dawn." - Rudolph Valentino, silent screen actor.

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Homosexuality is a problem because an unenlightened society has made it a problem, but I have received letters by the thousands from gay people telling me that they wouldn't be straight if they had a choice. All they ask is to be allowed to love in their own way without facing the charge that they are "sick and twisted." I say, love and let love. - Abigail Van Buren, advice columnist

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"I am reminded of a colleague who reiterated 'all my homosexual patients are quite sick' -- to which I finally replied 'so are all my heterosexual patients.'" - Psychoanalyst Ernest Van Den Haag

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"I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults." - Gore Vidal

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"The ongoing psychopathic hatred of same-sexuality has made the United States the laughingstock of the civilized world. In most of the First World, monotheism is weak. Where it is weak or nonexistent, private sexual behavior has nothing to do at all with those not involved, much less the law. At least when the Emperor Justinian, a Christian monotheist, decided to outlaw sodomy, he had to come up with a good practical reason, which he did. It is well known, Justinian declared, that buggery is a principal cause of earthquakes, and so must be prohibited. But our monotheists, always eager to hate, still quote Leviticus, as if that loony text had anything useful to say about anything except, perhaps, the inadvisability of eating shellfish in the Jerusalem area." - Gore Vidal

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"Prejudices are what fools use for reason." - Francois-Marie de Voltaire

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Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it. Begin it now. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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There is no outward sign of true courtesy that does not rest on a deep moral foundation. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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A sobering thought: What if, right at this very moment, I am living up to my full potential? -- Jane Wagner

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As for those who think the Arab world promises freedom, the briefest study of its routine traditional treatment of blacks (slavery) and women (purdah) will provide relief from all illusion. If Malcolm X had been a black woman his last message to the world would have been entirely different. The brotherhood of Moslem men-all colors-may exist there, but part of the glue that holds them together is the thorough suppression of women. - Alice Walker

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"I love ya like the mother I had committed against her will." - Karen Walker/Will&Grace

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I am a deeply superficial person. - Andy Warhol (1928-1987)

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"If you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path." - Mary Webb

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"He who hesitates is a damned fool." - Mae West (1892-1980)

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"I only like two kinds of men: domestic and foreign." - Mae West

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"Too much of a good thing can be wonderful." - Mae West

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"The theater will be my medium to sex education. I pride myself on the fact that I have always been ahead of public teachers. I realized the importance of the problem and devoted my career in the theater to the education of the masses. I shall boldly continue to do so, in spite of criticism, insults, and narrow-minded bigots. I believe that when I have my own theater, as I hope to some time in the future, my purpose can go unhindered by silly and old-fashioned taboos and busy bodies." - Mae West

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"The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram." - E.P. Whipple

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"Most of the Christians I know in the area are as appalled at what happened as we are at the homosexual lifestyle." - Phillip Whitaker, pastor at Roanoke's Brambleton Baptist Church for 22 years, commenting on the Roanoke shootings (1 person killed, 6 wounded in random "waste some fags" shooting)

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"When you look at the black race, black people are very gifted in what we call worship and celebration. A lot of us like to dance, and if you go to black churches, you see people jumping up and down, because they really get into it. White people were blessed with the gift of structure and organization. You guys do a good job of building businesses and things of that nature and you know how to tap into money pretty much better than a lot of people do around the world. Hispanics are gifted in family structure. You can see a Hispanic person and they can put 20 or 30 people in one home. They were gifted in the family structure. When you look at the Asians, the Asian is very gifted in creation, creativity and inventions. If you go to Japan or any Asian country, they can turn a television into a watch. They're very creative. And you look at the Indians, they have been very gifted in the spirituality." - Reggie White, August 2000 speech to the Wisconsin legislature

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I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood; I see that the elementary laws never apologize.... - Walt Whitman

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O to be selfbalanced for contingencies! O to confront night, storms, hunger, ridicule, accidents, rebuffs as trees and animals do! - Walt Whitman

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"Reexamine everything you've been taught. Discard anything that is an insult to your soul and begin again." - Walt Whitman

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"I swore never to be silent whenever  and wherever human beings endure  suffering and humiliation.  We must always take sides.   Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." - Elie Wiesel (survivor of the Nazi concentration camps)

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The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference. - Elie Wiesel

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"There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest." - Elie Wiesel

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So many gods, so many creeds,
so many paths that wind and wind
while just the art of being kind
is all the sad world needs.
- Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American poet, 1896

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"I am not young enough to know everything." - Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

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Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty. - Oscar Wilde

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"Some cause happiness wherever they go, others whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

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"There are moments when one has to choose between living one's own life fully, entirely, completely - or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands" - Oscar Wilde

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"One should never trust a woman who tells one her real age. A woman who would tell one that, would tell one anything." - Oscar Wilde

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Thirty-five is a very attractive age, London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years. - Oscar Wilde

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"A visionary is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world." - Oscar Wilde

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Either this wallpaper goes, or I do! - Oscar Wilde on his deathbed

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"I have nothing to declare except my genius." - 1882-Oscar Wilde (to a customs agent) when arriving in New York to begin a lecture tour.

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"No man has a right in America to treat any other man tolerantly. For tolerance is the assumption of superiority" - Wendell Wilkie (1892-1944)

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"What you risk reveals what you value." - Jeanette Winterson

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"I'm beginning to believe that one of the last frontiers left for radical gesture is the imagination. At least in my ungoverned imagination I can fuck somebody without a rubber, or I can, in the privacy of my own skull, douse Helms with a bucket of gasoline and set his putrid ass on fire or throw congressman William Dannemeyer off the Empire State building. These fantasies give me distance from my outrage for a few seconds. They give me momentary comfort. Sexuality defined in images gives me comfort in a hostile world. They give me strength." - David Wojnarowicz, Writer/Performer/Artist

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One day this kid will get larger. One day this kid will come to know something that causes a sensation equivalent to the separaion of the earth from its axis. One day this kid will reach a point where he senses a division that isn't mathematical. One day this kid will feel something stir in his heart and thoat and mouth. One day this kid will find something in his mind and body and soul that makes him hungry. One day this kid will do something that causes men who wear the uniforms of priests and rabbis, men who inhabit certain stone buildings, to call for his death. One day politicians will enact legislation against this kid. One day families will give false information to their children and each child will pass that information down generationally to their families and that information will be designed to make existence intolerable for this kid. One day this kid will begin to experience all this activity in his environment and that activity and information will compel him to commit suicide or submit to danger in hopes of being murdered or submit to silence and invisibility. Or one day this kid will talk. When he begins to talk, men who develop a fear of this kid will attempt to silence him with strangling, fists, prison, suffocation, rape, intimidation, drugging, ropes, guns, laws, menace, roving gangs, bottles, knives, religion, decapitation, and immolation by fire. Doctors will pronounce this kid curable as if his brain were a virus. This kid will lose his constitutional rights against the government's invasion of his privacy. This kid will be faced with electro-shock, drugs, and conditioning therapies in laboratories tended by psychologists and research scientists. He wil be subject to loss of home, civil rights, jobs, and all conceivable feedoms. All this will begin to happen in one or two years when he discovers he desires to place his naked body on the naked body of another boy.
- David Wojnarowicz - part of an Untitled work (1990) which contains the above text surrounding a photograph of the artist as a young boy.

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"Be more concerned with your character than your reputation. Your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are." - John Wooden

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Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.  - Steven Wright

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"THE FEW, THE PROUD, THE PORN STARS: Breaking scandal in today's Los Angeles Times about a bunch of marines earning extra money by appearing in porn videos and magazines, catering mainly to gay men. Posing naked is a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Top brass are hyper-ventilating. Not a huge scandal to my mind. Soldiers have always misbehaved. But what's interesting to me is the light it sheds on the military's alleged fear of homosexuals. These guys are happy to pose naked in front of cameras for anonymous gay guys' pleasure but are freaked if someone openly gay is in the same unit. Can we say: cognitive dissonance? The truth is most servicemembers are not scared of other servicemembers' sexual attraction, as long as it doesn't get expressed on duty. These guys aren't afraid of Saddam Hussein. You think they can't function because a gay guy is in the bunk below? Not in a million years. The military gay ban, abandoned in every other NATO country bar Turkey without the slightest effect on morale or competence, is hanging by the thread of its own incoherence in the U.S. military. Pity it takes marines posing in gay porn to make this more than obvious." - 12:01:54 AM, 2/6/03 Eva Young, Near North, Minneapolis
eva@u... Blog is up: http://lloydletta.blogspot.com

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