If you are not personally free to be yourself in that most important of all human activities... the expression of love... then life itself loses its meaning.

I have tasted freedom. I will not give up that which I have tasted. I have a lot more to drink. For that reason, the political numbers game will be played. I know the rules of their game now and how to play it.

Freedom is too enormous to be slipped under a closet door.

We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.

To sit on the front steps — whether it's a veranda in a small town or a concrete stoop in a big city — and to talk to our neighborhoods is infinitely more important than to huddle on the living-room lounger and watch a make-believe world in not-quite living color.

A reading of the Declaration of Independence on the steps of a building is widely covered. The events that started the American Revolution were the meetings in homes, pubs, on street corners.

I finally reached the point where I knew I had to become involved or shut up.