Top 80 Dan Savage Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We all have our scars. That’s what falling is love is all about: revealing your scars to somebody who then loves you anyway.”

— Dan Savage

2. “You can’t pray away the gay, but you can torture a conflicted closet-case to death.”

— Dan Savage

3. “Relationships are monuments build on lies.”

— Dan Savage

4. “The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that each of us is free to go our own way, even if the ways some of us may choose to go seem sinful or shocking to our fellow citizens.”

— Dan Savage

5. “Today’s unspeakable perversion is tomorrow’s kink, is next week’s good clean fun.”

— Dan Savage

6. “Mother’s Day is a torment if your mother is dead. Valentine’s Day is a torment if you don’t got one. And at some point in our lives, we will be tormented by Valentine’s Day even if we’re relatively lucky in love.”

— Dan Savage

7. “The bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he’s being bullied. I couldn’t go home and open up to my parents.”

— Dan Savage

8. “Children have a right to some stability and constancy from the adults in their lives.”

— Dan Savage

9. “Books are magic: you never know where they’re going to end up.”

— Dan Savage

10. “But it doesn’t matter what you’re doing, it matters how you’re doing it.”

— Dan Savage

11. “Kids are like heroin, a little heroin addiction. When it’s bad, you’ve never been so miserable, but when it’s good you’ve never been so high.”

— Dan Savage

12. “I’m not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.”

— Dan Savage

13. “Preaching to the choir actually arms the choir with arguments and elevates the choir’s discourse. There’s a reason the right does it and does it well and triumphs.”

— Dan Savage

14. “Women can go on marrying and pretending that their boyfriends and husbands are Mr. Darcy or some RomCom dream man. But where’s that going to get ’em? Besides divorce court?”

— Dan Savage

15. “I have a thick skin, but I have a heart.”

— Dan Savage

16. “A certain tiny percentage of everyone is gay.”

— Dan Savage

17. “I’m always telling people who say two men can’t make a baby: ‘Anything is possible for God. I’m going to keep inseminating my husband and keep my fingers crossed.’”

— Dan Savage

18. “I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that’s worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they’ll be joining a life that’s already really good.”

— Dan Savage

19. “Ultimately life is disease, death and oblivion. It’s still better than high school.”

— Dan Savage

20. “Like it or not children are being raised by gay and lesbian parents all over America – as many as 10 million children. And it does nothing to make their lives more stable and secure to attack their families, to attack their parents to prevent us from marrying each other.”

— Dan Savage

21. “A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It’s often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.”

— Dan Savage

22. “It’s going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven’t had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you’re getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.”

— Dan Savage

23. “Only someone obsessed with sexual fidelity to an unhealthy degree places a higher value on preserving the ideal of monogamous marriage over preserving an actual marriage.”

— Dan Savage

24. “Is it adultery if I’m committing it at one end of a guy and he’s committing it at the other end of that same guy?”

— Dan Savage

25. “The Bible is a radically pro-slavery document. Slave owners waved Bibles over their heads in the Civil War and justified it.”

— Dan Savage

26. “Bisexuals need to recognize that their being closeted is a huge contributing factor to the hostility they face.”

— Dan Savage

27. “Outing is brutal and it should be reserved for brutes.”

— Dan Savage

28. “I waver between a cop-out agnostic and principled atheism.”

— Dan Savage

29. “Jesus commanded his followers to clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, and care for the sick. Making health care available to all seems like a no-brainer, Jesus-wise, among the most Christian projects a president, or a nation, could possible undertake.”

— Dan Savage

30. “Actual gay people can make many others feel uncomfortable and paranoid because they don’t know and can’t articulate what makes a person gay, and they worry that maybe they themselves are gay.”

— Dan Savage

31. “Straight couples don’t have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn’t compulsory and its absence doesn’t invalidate a marriage.”

— Dan Savage

32. “You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay – that was literally the last place many people went.”

— Dan Savage

33. “Every question is a hypothetical question for everyone but the person who asks it.”

— Dan Savage

34. “When you’re a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you’re writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.”

— Dan Savage

35. “You know, my problem is I cant say no to people, especially people who want to write me checks to do things.”

— Dan Savage

36. “The mistake that straight people made was imposing the monogamous expectation on men. Men were never expected to be monogamous.”

— Dan Savage

37. “Oftentimes, when people write me 4,000-word letters, I write them back and tell them if their problem’s that complicated, they probably need a lawyer or a cop, and not me.”

— Dan Savage

38. “I get letters every year from women who think Valentine’s Day is an empty exercise, but are ironically pretty exercised when their boyfriends neglect or forget it.”

— Dan Savage

39. “TV commercials make parenting look like there are going to be good days and bad days – like, it’ll be this gentle wave, like you’ll have a blissed-out, really wonderful day or two, and then, you know, then you’ll have an issue. And what parenting is, is kind of earthquake.”

— Dan Savage

40. “Parenting is about being competent and responsible. It’s not about gender, necessarily.”

— Dan Savage

41. “No one has ever gone broke underestimating the insecurities of the gay and lesbian consumer.”

— Dan Savage

42. “To be gay is nothing to be proud of. It’s in how you are gay that you have something to be proud of, considering the obstacles placed in your path if you are gay.”

— Dan Savage

43. “The cultural expectation should be if there’s infidelity, the marriage is more important than fidelity.”

— Dan Savage

44. “Every American may have equal access to ice cream, but there’s no guarantee that the outcome of eating ice cream will be equal.”

— Dan Savage

45. “Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.”

— Dan Savage

46. “So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.”

— Dan Savage

47. “I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.”

— Dan Savage

48. “I believe it’s in the best interests of a child to be in a stable environment.”

— Dan Savage

49. “I’m an agnosto-theist. I cross myself on airplanes. I pray when I’m sick. When you’re sick I’ll keep you in my thoughts; when I’m sick, I’m entreating a higher power.”

— Dan Savage

50. “Most Americans don’t care about gay marriage. But it matters very much to the knuckle-draggers and Christianists and whack jobs in Bush’s ever smaller base.”

— Dan Savage