"There's no one to hear. You might as well scream. They never woke up from the american dream. And they don't understand what they don't see. And they look through you and they look past me."
--- from Nowhere To Go by Melissa Etheridge

"If homosexuality is a disease, lets all call in queer to work 'Hello. Can't work today, still queer'."
--- by Robin Tyler

"There are a lot of lesbians who don't believe that they're oppressed. It's just that they aren't aware of their oppression."
--- by Ruth Simpson in 1971

"The mother and the lesbian are two polarized images on which male subjectivity has projected some of its deepest fears and hatred of women. The lesbian mother is a contradiction; she is not supposed to exist...her existence suggests that no woman, even one who has married and borne children, necessarily belongs to a man or men."
--- by Adrienne Rich in 1977

"Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.
Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.
Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.
Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one's own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.
The above forms of human blindness stem from the same root - the inability to recognize or tolerate the notion of difference as a beneficial and dynamic human force, and one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self."
--- by Audre Lorde in 1978

"We women are the best thing going - we are warm, passionate, we cry and we live! Let's celebrate!"
--- by Margaret Sloan-Hunter in 1974

"I think it's important to have more Lesbians and Gays visible in our society so people can see there is not an enormous difference between us and we don't have anything to fear from each other."
--- by Mary Morgan in 1981

"We need Everyone to be strong, men and women. We need to be helping each other. I think that our lesbianism is very positive because it strengthens the overall movement."
--- by Barbara Noda in 1979

You're neither unnatural, nor abominable, nor mad; you're as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you're unexplained as yet -- you've not got your niche in creation.
--- Radclyffe Hall in The Well of Loneliness in 1928

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me--so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins.
--- Audre Lorde

Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another?
--- Mary MacLane, The Story of Mary MacLane by Herself

I have lived and slept in the same bed with English countesses and Prussian farm women...no woman has excited passions among women more than I have.
--- Florence Nightingale

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
--- Adrienne Rich

Hick darling...I couldn't say je t'aime et je t'adore as I longed to do, but always remember I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.
--- Eleanor Roosevelt, in a letter to Lorena Hickok

There is nothing mixed up about a woman who loves women, who wants to have sex with them, or who identifies as a lesbian. It is society that is mixed up because it punishes people for not conforming to its gender stereotypes.
--- Edward Stein, editor of Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy

I became a lesbian because of women, because women are beautiful, strong, and compassionate.
--- Rita Mae Brown