Christmas can have a real melancholy aspect, 'cause it packages itself as this idea of perfect family cohesion and love, and you're always going to come up short when you measure your personal life against the idealized personal lives that are constantly thrust in our faces, primarily by TV commercials.

— Dan Savage

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

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

I got picked on a lot, even by teachers too. I liked to listen to musicals and bake, and my homeroom teacher found out and mocked me in front of the whole class for baking.

— Dan Savage

I think the best thing for you to do is just live your life. Live a life that's worth living, one where you do what you want to do, pursue your passions. That way, if you meet someone, they'll be joining a life that's already perfect.

— Dan Savage

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

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

— Dan Savage

One person simply can’t be all things to another person – sexually or otherwise—and unmet needs, unfulfilled desire, and unexplored possibilities are prices we pay to be in LTRs (long –term relationships). Monogamous, polyamorous, Freedom, or whatever: All couples people walk around feeling a little unfulfilled. (Single people, too). Because no one gets everything they want.

— Dan Savage

Straight couples don't have to be monogamous to be married or married to be monogamous. Monogamy no more defines marriage than the presence of children does. Monogamy isn't compulsory, and its absence doesn't invalidate a marriage.

— Dan Savage

The Bible is only as good and decent as the person reading it.

— Dan Savage