Top 80 Dan Savage Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Pride became this dogma which meant you couldn’t criticize anything gay – if you were the least bit critical of gay culture or people or any gay person doing any gay thing, that was an insufficient display of pride. You were suffering from internalized homophobia. As opposed to external homophobia.”

— Dan Savage

52. “I didn’t want kids to think that to be happy, they had to be famous or rich or live in the big city.”

— Dan Savage

53. “My dad was a homicide cop in the gay neighborhood in the city when gay neighborhoods were desperate, depressing, sad places run by the mob. The only gay people he’d met when I came out to him were corpses.”

— Dan Savage

54. “Resentment has a way of metastasizing into bitterness, and bitterness has a way of curdling into the kind of anger that can doom a relationship.”

— Dan Savage

55. “A lot of people are living their lives online in much more public ways with Facebook and Twitter.”

— Dan Savage

56. “You want to help gay kids, you have to reach them in middle school and high school, when they’re being bullied.”

— Dan Savage

57. “One man’s blasphemy doesn’t override other people’s free-speech rights, their freedom to publish, freedom of thought.”

— Dan Savage

58. “Yes, yes: Taking out Saddam Hussein means war, and war is bad for children and other living things. I went to grade school in the 1970s, and I recall the poster. But there are times when war is not only a tragic and unavoidable necessity, but also good for children and other living things.”

— Dan Savage

59. “Sometimes I talk to religious people about my column or what I do, and I ask them to, you know, read 20 or 30 of them and then come tell me that the message at the heart of every column isn’t, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ In every possible sense.”

— Dan Savage

60. “I don’t think that sin and pursuing happiness are not necessarily the same thing.”

— Dan Savage

61. “I think the ‘South Park’ guys are brilliant.”

— Dan Savage

62. “In an open adoption agreement, you agree to a minimum number of visits – a floor, not a ceiling. It’s enforceable.”

— Dan Savage

63. “I don’t understand how real Christians let that little f – ker get away with that.”

— Dan Savage

64. “How can you tell somebody who is pursuing happiness that they’re somehow not American when that was the very first promise that America made?”

— Dan Savage

65. “I own a lot of my house, because I’m Irish and from people who never owned anything.”

— Dan Savage

66. “The truly revolutionary promise of our nation’s founding document is the freedom to pursue happiness-with-a-capital-H.”

— Dan Savage

67. “A lot of people think that telling people you’re gay is something someone might say just to get attention.”

— Dan Savage

68. “We’re living through an age of irrationality and religious “fervor” I would call it religious idiocy. It’s exhausting to year after year be on the receiving end of this demagoguery.”

— Dan Savage

69. “School is very conformist, and one of the very first conforming that goes on in preschool and kindergarten is gender.”

— Dan Savage

70. “Really, when it comes to gay rights, there’s two wars going on. The first war is political. But the culture war is over.”

— Dan Savage

71. “A huge part of what animates homophobia among young people is paranoia and fear of their own capacity to be gay themselves.”

— Dan Savage

72. “I’m searching for some exit poll data from California. I’ll eat my shorts if gay and lesbian voters went for McCain at anything approaching the rate that black voters went for Prop 8.”

— Dan Savage

73. “Terry cooked for me, but I resented having to do dishes. As I saw it, Terry liked cooking-he enjoyed it, he told me so. Well, I didn’t enjoy washing dishes- I hated it, and I’d told him so-and didn’t see why I should have to do something I hated after he got to do something he liked. I mean, that wasn’t fair, was it?”

— Dan Savage

74. “Natural isn’t something I get called a lot in Texas.”

— Dan Savage

75. “When I was a kid, and I was odd, the default assumption was that I was odd, not that I was gay. Now when a kid is odd in a Greensburg, gay or straight, the default assumption is gay.”

— Dan Savage

76. “I really enjoy doing theater, but doing theater in Seattle is like dropping a brick in a bottomless well. It’s gratifying, but it’s almost like doing radio. It’s ephemeral.”

— Dan Savage

77. “I think it’s going to take three or four generations of gay people being able to get married before it starts feeling less like we’re going through these motions, that we’re aping a heterosexual institution.”

— Dan Savage

78. “I’m allergic to dogs, so I couldn’t even adopt what gay men typically adopt when they have that maternal gene.”

— Dan Savage

79. “I don’t write about my life in my column.”

— Dan Savage

80. “I wouldn’t say that holidays are manufactured by corporations, but they’re certainly exploited and mined by them.”

— Dan Savage

81. “The only way to get gay issues off the front pages of Canadian newspapers is to grant gay and lesbian people our full civil equality and leave it alone.”

— Dan Savage

82. “Sedaris, in his essay in the It Gets Better book, writes that when he was growing up nobody called him gay because you might as well have called him a warlock. Nobody knew what gay was.”

— Dan Savage

83. “For me, my discomfort with gay weddings was articulated by a close friend, who observed that gay people getting married is like retarded people getting together to give each other PhDs. It doesn’t make them smarter, and it doesn’t make us married.”

— Dan Savage