Top 70 Larry Kramer Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I love being gay. I love gay people. I think we’re better than other people. I really do. I think we’re smarter and more talented and more aware. I do, I totally do. I really do think all of these things. And I try very hard to remember all this.”

— Larry Kramer

2. “The only safe place left is the dark.”

— Larry Kramer

3. “There will always be enemies. Time to stop being your own.”

— Larry Kramer

4. “I now realize that I am a gay man before anything else. Other gays may think they’re a Jew first, or black, or a banker, but I’m gay.”

— Larry Kramer

5. “Cock-a-doodle-do! Any cock will do!”

— Larry Kramer

6. “You do not get more with honey than with vinegar.”

— Larry Kramer

7. “Saying someone is gay who is gay no longer constitutes defamation or slander or libel. You cannot defame someone by telling the truth.”

— Larry Kramer

8. “Mr. Do-Nothing Obama will say today, ‘Lets think of all the poor dead people’ – or ‘let’s honor all the dead’ instead of fighting for the living. He has been really useless in terms of both HIV and gay issues. He is simply not a leader. He may be president, but he is not a leader.”

— Larry Kramer

9. “George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were gay, just for starters. They didn’t have a name for it, but their primary affections and intellectual attractions were all for other men.”

— Larry Kramer

10. “Don’t lose that anger. Just have a little more patience and forgiveness. For yourself as well.”

— Larry Kramer

11. “By nature, Im an optimistic person. No one believes it, but I am.”

— Larry Kramer

12. “The point about L-O-V-E is that we hate the word. Because we vulgarize it. It should be taboo, forbidden from utterance for many years, till we’ve found a new and a better idea.”

— Larry Kramer

13. “Almost more than talent you need tenacity, and an infinite capacity for rejection, if you are to succeed.”

— Larry Kramer

14. “The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America.”

— Larry Kramer

15. “I do not think the gay population has been all that rabid for gay marriage. Note that I do not use the words ‘gay community.’ Expunge that expression from your vocabulary. We are not a community.”

— Larry Kramer

16. “No matter what any struggle accomplishes, time, life, death bring in their changes, and new oppressions are always forming from the ashes of the old.”

— Larry Kramer

17. “You’d think one day we’d learn. You don’t get anything unless you fight for it, united and with visible numbers. If ACT UP taught us anything, it taught us that.”

— Larry Kramer

18. “I don’t consider myself an artist. I consider myself a very opinionated man who uses words as fighting tools.”

— Larry Kramer

19. “We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.”

— Larry Kramer

20. “The tyranny of the blood test.”

— Larry Kramer

21. “Religion is such an icky, sticky thing, full of tortuous – well, everything. Why is it so essential for man to be forced, for that is what religion relies on, force, to believe in anything but himself? And this is what John Winthrop should represent for us: the utter disdain he and Puritanism have for the self, for the human, for the human being.”

— Larry Kramer

22. “All your life has been a journey to find an identity.”

— Larry Kramer

23. “Activism is very seductive, and writing is painful and hard. It’s very scary to have a death threat living over your head. Activism is very sustaining. But I don’t view myself as a political person. I’m just someone who desperately wants to stay alive.”

— Larry Kramer

24. “Writers are given one great story to tell their story. I’m telling my story as a political document.”

— Larry Kramer

25. “This is always history’s greatest failure, its inability to believe what it sees, what, almost always, someone sees.”

— Larry Kramer

26. “AIDS is a plague – numerically, statistically and by any definition known to modern public health – though no one in authority has the guts to call it one.”

— Larry Kramer

27. “Too many people hate the people that AIDS most affects: gay people and people of color. I do not mean dislike, or feel uncomfortable with. I mean hate. Downright hate. Down and dirty hate.”

— Larry Kramer

28. “Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.”

— Larry Kramer

29. “I think being gay and gay people are the most wonderful things in the world. I wish all of us could have the power and pride to benefit from what is rightfully ours. Why isn’t there an enormous building in Washington called the ‘National Association of Lesbian and Gay Concerns’ to lobby for us?”

— Larry Kramer

30. “I think Ed Koch is the person most responsible for allowing AIDS to get out of control. It happened here first, on his watch. If he had done what any moral human being should have done in the beginning, and put out alarms, then a lot fewer people would have gotten sick.”

— Larry Kramer

31. “I was at Yale from 1953 to 1957, and I tried to commit suicide in my freshman year because I was gay, and I thought I was the only person in the school who was. I was just totally and utterly miserable.”

— Larry Kramer

32. “Gay life in 1970 was very bleak, compartmentalized. You didn’t take it to work. You had to really lead a double life. There were bars, but you sort of snuck in and snuck out. Activism and gay pride simply didn’t exist. I don’t even think the word ‘gay’ was in existence.”

— Larry Kramer

33. “AIDS was allowed to happen. It is a plague that need not have happened. It is a plague that could have been contained from the very beginning.”

— Larry Kramer

34. “I forgot that San Francisco is not an angry city like New York. Gays have gotten what they wanted there over the years, unlike New York, where we had to fight for everything.”

— Larry Kramer

35. “The guys in New York don’t know the new media. San Francisco takes more risks as a culture.”

— Larry Kramer

36. “We have to think bigger as writers. We have to try and change the world.”

— Larry Kramer

37. “I don’t mind about the dead ones. They’re dead. The worst of it is, they cling to the living and won’t let go.”

— Larry Kramer

38. “There are three roles one can play as a homosexual: one involving being the daddy to someone who is the son, another, therefore, being the sonny to that pop, the third involving looking for yourself in someone approximately identical to you.”

— Larry Kramer

39. “Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.”

— Larry Kramer

40. “There’s no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?”

— Larry Kramer

41. “The system will always be here. The system doesn’t change.”

— Larry Kramer

42. “All you want is Love. And if you’ve wanted love so badly, why haven’t you had it? Does not that say something about The Wanter, not his World?”

— Larry Kramer

43. “Some reporter called me ‘the angriest gay man in the world’ or some such. Well, it stuck, but I realized it was very useful.”

— Larry Kramer

44. “I gave you books. You gave me plants. Books live. Plants die.”

— Larry Kramer

45. “Quick! what’s the Proust line? – that we’re attracted to those people who have qualities we hate in ourselves?”

— Larry Kramer

46. “We have the ultimate in freedom – we have absolutely no responsibilities! – and we’re abusing it.”

— Larry Kramer

47. “I have a life expectancy of ten more minutes I’m going to eat what I want to eat.”

— Larry Kramer

48. “Most of the Michelle Bachmanns and Mitt Romneys who say such terrible things about us actually is a positive force, because it allows sensible people to realize how stupid and vile their beliefs are.”

— Larry Kramer

49. “The warring conflict in man between the intellect and the libido shall never be twinned.”

— Larry Kramer

50. “All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment.”

— Larry Kramer