Quotes from Andrew Sullivan

How can you tell when a political ideology has become the equivalent of a religion?

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

You know, American citizens, I don't think, ever thought that the right to the pursuit of happiness did not include the right to marry the person you love. But for a whole number of Americans, gay Americans, that happens to be true.

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.

What gay culture is before it is anything else, before it is a culture of desire or a culture of subversion or a culture of pain, is a culture of friendship.

If you think you'll find intellectual stimulation, you're thinking of another era. The conversations are invariably about money or property or schools. I've never been more bored by casual chat.

For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships — certainly far more so than romantic love. Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.

Even if it's deep unhappiness, it's your unhappiness.

In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.

Here's why I find it impossible to be a Republican: any crowd that instantly cheers the execution of 234 individuals is a crowd I want to flee, not join.

Unlike a variety of other relationships,friendship requires an acknowledgement by both parties that they are involved or it fails to exist.

It has been said that a person's religion is best defined not by what he says what he believes but by what he actually does.Equally, it could be said that one's friends are simply those people with whom one spends one's life.Period.Anything else is a form of rationalization. Perhaps the criterion of 'People with whom one spends one's life is better reframed as people on whom one spends one's emotional energies.

Friendship, I learned, provided a buffer in the interplay of emotions, a distance that made the risk of intimacy bearable, a space that allowed the other person to remain safely another person.

I've always been a pretty candid person. I'm not a very secretive person; I'm not a very discreet person. One of my best friends once described me as pathologically indiscreet.

The dirty little secret of journalism is that it really isn't a profession, it's a craft. All you need is a telephone and a conscience and you're all set.

If you change the society and a culture, the politics will follow.

Blogging is to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.

I purge compulsively. I'm constantly shedding things.

You know, American citizens, I don't think, ever thought that the right to the pursuit of happiness did not include the right to marry the person you love. But for a whole number of Americans, gay Americans, that happens to be true.

My own early crusade for same-sex marriage, for example, is now mainstream gay politics. It wasn't when I started.

When you put a tiny and despised minority up for a popular vote, the minority usually loses.

I actually bought the argument that if we democratized Iraq, we could create a space for venting some of the stuff that's going on in the Middle East in these autocratic regimes that is expressing itself through jihadism, because it has nowhere else to express itself.

The Dixiecrats meet again in New York. Now they're called Republicans.

We've got fuel prices coming down and good travel numbers coming out, so it's not surprising airline stocks are going up.