It's also one thing to see a celebrity or some kind of character on a TV show being gay. It's a totally different thing when you know your husband... not your husband, but your brother or your friend or the dude you hung out in high school was gay. I mean, that is what changes people's minds, what changes people's minds.

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.

In many ways, my attachment to human freedom was completely compatible with my right to live freely as a homosexual.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

A mind is a wonderful thing to change.

Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.

The one thing we know about torture is that it was never designed in the first place to get at the actual truth of anything; it was designed in the darkest days of human history to produce false confessions in order to annihilate political and religious dissidents. And that is how it always works: it gets confessions regardless of their accuracy.