75 powerful LGBTQ quotes for Pride Month and every month
Observed in June, Pride Month is a time for celebration, reflection and remembrance.
It's also a time to spotlight LGBTQ voices and members of the community including historymakers like Harvey Milk, Marsha P. Johnson and other luminaries whose sacrifices and advocacy helped shaped the LGBTQ movement.
In honor of their accomplishments, we've collected some of their most memorable quotes, as well as the notable words of other leaders, activists and allies.
In the compilation below, you'll find empowering messages, short LGBTQ quotes and inspirational sayings to use for Pride Month, to commemorate the 1969 Stonewall Uprising or to pay tribute to trailblazers, both past and present.
Share these meaningful sentiments to encourage awareness and remembrance or read them over in quiet reflection.
For all, these powerful quotes are a continuing reminder that until everyone is truly equal, no one is.
Empowering LGBTQ quotes
“No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.” — Marsha P. Johnson
“We deserve to experience love fully, equally, without shame and without compromise.” — Elliot Page
“Who you are is beautiful and amazing.” — Laverne Cox
“Gender is who you are, and sexuality is who you want.” — C.N. Lester, “Trans Like Me: A Journey for All of Us”
“Hope will never be silent.” — Harvey Milk
“Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl.” — Julie Anne Peters, “Keeping You a Secret”
“When all Americans are treated as equal, no matter who they are or whom they love, we are all more free.” — Barack Obama
“Love is never wrong.” — Melissa Etheridge
“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — E.E. Cummings
“Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing we’ll ever do.” — Brené Brown, “The Gifts of Imperfection”
“We are powerful because we have survived.” — Audre Lorde
“Where there is love, there is life.” — Mahatma Gandhi
“We declare that human rights are for all of us, all the time: whoever we are and wherever we are from; no matter our class, our opinions, our sexual orientation.” — Ban Ki-moon
“To realize a world of equality and dignity for all, we will have to change laws and policies; we will also have to change hearts and minds.” — Rick Parnell
“Why is it that, as a culture, we are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns than holding hands?”— Ernest J. Gaines
“The world has caught up with me and I’m a living witness that dreams do come true, even if they aren’t the ones you start out with.” — Billy Porter
“Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.” — Amelia Earhart, “Courage”
“Life is about finding yourself, embracing your strengths and weaknesses, and being true to who you are.” — Oprah Winfrey
“To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.” — Bayard Rustin
“With ignorance comes fear, from fear comes bigotry. Education is the key to acceptance.” — Kathleen Patel, “The Bullying Epidemic”
“The only queer people are those who don’t love anybody.” — Rita Mae Brown
“Race, gender, religion, sexuality, we are all people and that’s it. We’re all people. We’re all equal.” ― Connor Franta
Inspirational LGBTQ quotes
“History isn’t something you look back at and say it was inevitable. It happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.” — Marsha P. Johnson
“It’s about finding your values, and committing to them. It’s about finding your North Star. It’s about making choices. Some are easy. Some are hard. And some will make you question everything.” — Tim Cook
“Married is a magic word. And it is magic throughout the world. It has to do with our dignity as human beings, to be who we are openly.” — Edith Windsor
“It’s just really important that we start celebrating our differences. Let’s start tolerating first, but then we need to celebrate our differences.” — Billie Jean King
“Folks who were willing to endure bullying and taunts, and stayed strong, and came to believe in themselves and who they were, and slowly made an entire country realize that love is love.” — Barack Obama
“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.” — Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”
“We’re all different in many ways and alike in many ways and special in some sort of way.” — Larry Kramer, “The Normal Heart & The Destiny of Me”
“I am no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.” — Angela Davis
“Equality means more than passing laws. The struggle is really won in the hearts and minds of the community, where it really counts.” — Barbara Gittings
“No one changes the world who isn’t obsessed.” — Billie Jean King
“When you put love out in the world it travels, and it can touch people and reach people in ways that we never even expected.” — Laverne Cox
“We struggle and fight for our joy — an unreserved and unapologetic joy that springs from our ability to live as we are. It’s a joy worth fighting for and it’s this joy that links all of our struggles together.” — Lady Phyll
“What I liked about the rainbow is that it fits all of us. It’s all the colors. It represents all the genders. It represents all the races. It’s the rainbow of humanity.” — Gilbert Baker
“The richness, beauty and depths of love can only be fully experienced in a climate of complete openness, honesty and vulnerability.” — Anthony Venn Brown
“It takes no compromise to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression.” — Harvey Milk
Short LGBTQ quotes
“You never completely have your rights, one person, until you all have your rights.” — Marsha P. Johnson
“We will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets.” — Harvey Milk
“We are all one — and if we don’t know it, we will learn it the hard way.” — Bayard Rustin
“I’m not missing a moment of this — it’s the revolution!” — Sylvia Rivera
“When are doing something that is right, you just do it and take care … someone has to do this.” — Alice Nkom
“There’s nothing wrong with you. There’s a lot wrong with the world you live in.” — Chris Colfer
“We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.” — Bayard Rustin
“Fears are not facts.” — Chaz Bono, “Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man”
“Accept no one’s definition of your life, define yourself.” ― Harvey Fierstein
“If I wait for someone else to validate my existence, it will mean that I’m shortchanging myself.” — Zanele Muholi
“Openness may not completely disarm prejudice, but it’s a good place to start.” — Jason Collins
“Nature made a mistake which I have corrected, and I am now your daughter.” — Christine Jorgensen
“Courage is one thing that no one can ever take away from you.” ― Chris Colfer, “The Wishing Spell”
Meaningful LGBTQ quotes
“The next time someone asks you why LGBT Pride marches exist or why Gay Pride Month is June tell them, ‘A bisexual woman named Brenda Howard thought it should be.’” — Brenda Howard
“It is absolutely imperative that every human being’s freedom and human rights are respected, all over the world.” — Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir
“It is as if on the morning of June 28, 1969, America symbolically got back the anger she had created by her neglect of her most despised children: the fairies, queens, and nelly boys she had so utterly abandoned, saying she did not want them.” — David Carter, “Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution”
“Love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?” — James Baldwin, “Giovanni’s Room”
“Every single American — gay, straight, lesbian, bisexual, transgender — every single American deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society. It’s a pretty simple proposition.” — Barack Obama
“It’s been tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It’s also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you’re the CEO of Apple.” — Tim Cook
“While as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.” — Anderson Cooper
“That nothing here is promised, not one day. And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside. Now fill the world with music, love and pride.” — Lin-Manuel Miranda
“Family belongs to community, and community takes its cues from family. We need to go back to real community engagement that sees us as people. We need to take back our lives by engaging our families and educating our communities.” — Beverley Ditsie
“Remember what things make you special and embrace those because there are so many things that aren’t on the outside that are so important and people find so beautiful.” — Miley Cyrus
“I am a firm believer that you don’t achieve greatness on your own. There is always someone there to lend a hand.” — Greg Louganis
“When I dare to be powerful — to use my strength in the service of my vision — then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” — Audre Lorde
“I see each and every one of you. The things that make us different, those are our superpowers — every day when you walk out the door and put on your imaginary cape and go out there and conquer the world because the world would not be as beautiful as it is if we weren’t in it.” — Lena Waithe
“Rights are won only by those who make their voices heard.” — Harvey Milk, “The Harvey Milk Interviews: In His Own Words”
“The next generation is so far advanced over us ... I love that a lot of younger people now come out that would never have come out in the old days. Of course, they are born into a community already. They just have to discover it, whereas we were still building it.” — Edith Windsor
“All men are created equal. No matter how hard they try, they can never erase those words. — Harvey Milk, “The Harvey Milk Interviews: In His Own Words”
“Progress is unimaginably difficult, dangerous, always at risk, always made by people with only partial vision.” — Larry Kramer, “The Normal Heart and The Destiny of Me: Two Plays”
“How many years has it taken people to realize that we are all brothers and sisters and human beings in the human race?” — Marsha P. Johnson
“It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.” — Audre Lorde, “Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches”
“For me, the transgender thing is the reality of my life. It’s the reality of my existence and it’s something that I’ve come to believe is beautiful about me.” — Laverne Cox
“When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” — Ellen DeGeneres, “Seriously... I’m Kidding”
“A lot of my work is to stay grounded, is to stay spiritual. It is to disconnect from what other people say about me, but also to try and be connected to the joy and the love.” — Laverne Cox
“I see your true colors shining through / I see your true colors and that’s why I love you / So, don’t be afraid to let them show / Your true colors / True colors are beautiful / Like a rainbow.” — Cyndi Lauper, “True Colors”
“There will not be a magic day when we wake up and it’s now okay to express ourselves publicly. We make that day by doing things publicly until it’s simply the way things are.” — Tammy Baldwin
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
