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“…but today is not the day.

Today, April 2, 1992.”

“I have died too many deaths that were not mine.”

“Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it belonging to us all.”

“Even when you know it’s coming, a death is a shock. Shock as in ‘electrical shock’.”

“I have tried to learn my anger’s usefulness to me as well as its limitations.”

“I’m not very good at being ashamed of myself.”

“Erie is the shallowest Great Lake.”

“I never eviscerate interviewers unless they attempt to eviscerate me first.”

“In the end, it comes down to a simple kernel of truth:

We cannot give up.”

“The only option is to keep going.”

“Never bet against America. Refuse to believe that government doesn’t work.”

“We can’t let the fight for democracy become drudgery; we have to prepare ourselves for it joyfully without taking it any less seriously.”

“If an American president tried to stop elections entirely, the public outcry would be swift.”

Vance, quoting Orwell’s 1984:

“‘In a way, the world-view of the Oarty imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening…’

“Now we see the consequences of preserving the fiction that all the people on both sides of the political divide we’re operating in good faith. You can be polite to everyone, or you can save the Republic. But you cannot do both.”

“Often it’s the people who populate them who are flawed, not the institutional framework itself.”

“When the public perpetuates narratives that the institutions are broken and talks about walking away from them, it plays into his hands and makes his ascension to power that much easier. The path to autocracy is littered with battered and broken institutions. If you want to preserve democracy, fight for the institutions.”

“The people in the room think that he is not an American, but he is more American than almost any of them. He has discovered America and his spirit is the spirit of pioneers. He is furious with America because it does not realize its strength and beauty and power.”

“The time-honored tradition of Americans is to stand together.”

“Though far from perfect, the system that was born with the taint of racism and misogyny has also proven itself capable of improvement, even if it is incremental.”

“Despair became a machine that would grind up anything you fed it.”

“I still don’t camp alone, though I hike alone…”

“Being around gay men liberated me because liberation is contagious.”

“.. but sometimes clarity requires complexity.”

“That a lot of men wanted and still want to harm women, especially young women, that a lot of people relish that harm, and a lot more dismissed it, impacted me in profoundly personal ways. But the cure for it wasn’t personal. There was no adjustment I could make in my psyche or my life that would make this problem acceptable or nonexistent and there was no where to go to leave it behind.”

“I feel haunted with gratitude, surrounded by so much suffering in the world.”

“Truth is a planet we haven’t discovered yet
But it has discovered us”

“No one on earth is tougher than a butch with a perm.”

“…grouchy discontent…”

“ although I was reinhabiting my historian’s role, I was doing it in a new way, helping to foster a field of inquiry - gender and sexuality studies- of more than academic interest: the archival materials being unearthed could provide the gay and feminist movements with fresh data for challenging old assumptions and stereotypes.”