Top 40 Charles M. Blow Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is no wrong time to do the right thing.”

— Charles M. Blow

2. “One doesn’t have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient. In fact, a man convinced of his virtue even in the midst of his vice is the worst kind of man.”

— Charles M. Blow

3. “You don’t become a teacher to make a world of money. You become a teacher to make a world of difference.”

— Charles M. Blow

4. “Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.”

— Charles M. Blow

5. “Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.”

— Charles M. Blow

6. “Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.”

— Charles M. Blow

7. “Different is not deviant, no matter what the world may say. You have the moral obligation to love yourself.”

— Charles M. Blow

8. “Voter apathy is a civic abdication.”

— Charles M. Blow

9. “While the word bisexual was technically correct, I would only slowly come to use it to refer to myself in part because of the derisive connotations. But, in addition, it would seem to me woefully inadequate and impressionistically inaccurate.”

— Charles M. Blow

10. “The only way to vanquish cowardice is to brandish courage.”

— Charles M. Blow

11. “The internet is ruthless. And people are very, very happy to let you know when they don’t like something.”

— Charles M. Blow

12. “Co-opted convictions will always betray you.”

— Charles M. Blow

13. “An illustration is a visual editorial – its just as nuanced. Everything that goes into it is a call you make: every color, every line weight, every angle.”

— Charles M. Blow

14. “A lie is like a cat: you need to stop it before it gets out the door or it’s really hard to catch.”

— Charles M. Blow

15. “One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.”

— Charles M. Blow

16. “There can be moments in your life where you may feel attracted to someone depending on circumstance, depending on the person of one gender or another, and sometimes where that is less of an influence in your life.”

— Charles M. Blow

17. “There are no ‘come shoot me’ clothes.”

— Charles M. Blow

18. “I was always a relatively quiet and introspective kid.”

— Charles M. Blow

19. “I had set about trying to make myself more polished than a country boy would be.”

— Charles M. Blow

20. “Being a world leader is less about destiny than focused determination, and it is there that we have faltered.”

— Charles M. Blow

21. “I know that life, I’ve done all those things, and I can still tell you that just being you is perfectly fine.”

— Charles M. Blow

22. “Elections have a way of cooling passions, especially when voters get what they want.”

— Charles M. Blow

23. “I’m trying to illuminate how perilously narrow we draw the concepts of masculinity and sexuality in our male culture.”

— Charles M. Blow

24. “I had to stop romanticizing the man I might have been and be the man that I was, not by neatly fitting other people’s definitions of masculinity or constructs of sexuality, but by being uniquely me – made in the image of God, nurtured by the bosom of nature, and forged in the fire of life.”

— Charles M. Blow

25. “You don’t have to dumb it down, but you do have to sum it up.”

— Charles M. Blow

26. “But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being wiling to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.”

— Charles M. Blow

27. “For a moment, I was free again. And that was the thing. I felt free only when I could separate myself from myself, when I could imagine that I was distinct from my body and life. There in the ethereal nothingness, in the quiet space of my mind, I found peace.”

— Charles M. Blow

28. “But even more important was the idea that, at any moment, we all had the awesome and underutilized power to simply let go of our past and step beyond it.”

— Charles M. Blow

29. “I would often recall one of my mother’s sayings: You could stay in hell for a little while if you knew that you were going to get out.”

— Charles M. Blow

30. “Then I had the idea that it wasn’t her that I needed in that moment so much as a father. This was an issue among boys and men. I needed a man who could understand and help me make sense of what happened, a heavy arm in whose crook I could hide. I needed a father like Jed, someone with the kind of eyes that forgave secret shame before it scarred the throat in the speaking.”

— Charles M. Blow

31. “Systems now do the bulk of the work; there is a perpetualness to racialized poverty and oppression. At a certain point – one long since passed in America – little effort is required to maintain the structures. Hopelessness and despair seep into the psyche. The damage becomes generational inheritance and culture caste.”

— Charles M. Blow

32. “It has been my experience that the “hardest” people in the world are actually the most fragile and the most soft-spoken are the strongest...”

— Charles M. Blow

33. “This is the reason I write, to remind people of honor and courage; to tell them that their cause isn’t lost, that their destiny is victory.”

— Charles M. Blow

34. “Our politics are overrun with characters acting at the behest of shadows.”

— Charles M. Blow

35. “We don’t vote for people because they are the exact embodiment of our values, but because they are likely to be the most responsive to them.”

— Charles M. Blow

36. “Racism doesn’t wither, but is trained when to advance or retreat. It becomes self-regulating.”

— Charles M. Blow

37. “White supremacy cannot be appeased. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be convinced. White supremacy is a ravenous and vicious. It is America’s embryotic fluid. America was born in it and genetically coded by it. No amount or hoping or waiting, coalition-building or Kumbaya can redress that reality. Racism is a flaw in the oppressor, not the oppressed.”

— Charles M. Blow

38. “He had learned a language and a protocol dictated by fear and necessary for survival. Like many older black people, he suffered from a chronic reflex racism. Having heard tell of – or witnessed, or experienced – so many horrible things done at the hands of white folks, he feared most and trusted few of them.”

— Charles M. Blow

39. “There was no hierarchy of humanity... And no one could strip me of my value and dignity, because no one had bestowed them- these things came into the world with me.”

— Charles M. Blow

40. “I was afraid that men like that could see the hole in me, a thing I dared not admit even to myself: that I had an aching need to be chosen, to be seen.”

— Charles M. Blow

41. “It was in my mind that I believed the thing had happened, and it was in my mind that I now fused together abuse and attraction.”

— Charles M. Blow

42. “Boys hijacked by hormones don’t really think, they chase. They see risk and consequences as if through the wrong end of a telescope: smaller and pushed far away.”

— Charles M. Blow