11 Powerful Quotes To Share During Pride Month

The struggle for equality doesn't stop when one oppressed group finally gains access or representation, or takes successful political action. It happens when all oppressed groups have the freedom to express themselves, and gain access to equal opportunities and the rights or privileges afforded to others at birth. In the U.S., we have quite a ways to go on many fronts. For the LGBTQI+ community, we have yet to fully recognize that the rights and privileges afforded to cis gendered, straight people could also mean violent interactions or discrimination. Issues such as gendered bathrooms, the institution of marriage or embracing who you are in a public setting is as much an issue of problematic culture as it is a problem with our legal system; a lot of these Pride quotes to share during June's Pride month celebration are extremely demonstrative of that.

But yet, the LGBTQI+ community and allies have carved out online spaces, fields of study, created impactful art and demanded that conversations about oppression also include how sexuality impacts those experiences. So while you get ready to celebrate pride month or head out to your city's celebrations, use your social to promote inclusivity. Continuing the conversation about what you can do to ensure that those rights and privileges are one day available to everyone can start right when you open your favorite social app.

Here are a few more things you can share, retweet or "like" to show your support:

1. " When nobody speaks your name, or even knows it, you, knowing it, must be the first to speak it."

Wisdom For The Soul, by Marlon Riggs.

2. "It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."

From Our Dead Behind Us: Poems, by Audre Lorde.

3. "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

From Ralph Waldo Emerson.

4. "Everybody's journey is individual. If you fall in love with a boy, you fall in a love with a boy. The fact that many Americans consider it a disease says more about them than it does about homosexuality."

From "Eve Auchincloss and Nancy Lynch," Conversations With James Baldwin.

5. "I'm faced daily with choosing violence / or a demeanor that saves every other life / but my own."

From Cordon Negro, by Essex Hemphill.

6. "No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow."

From Alice Walker.

7. "But in these highly untrustworthy media times, it’s time to stop measuring lesbian success by how much media representation we have. What we could focus on is actual lesbians and our culture."

From Letters To The Revolution, by Jewelle Gomez.

8."We have to constantly critique imperialists white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic"

From Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, by bell hooks.

9. "Self-definition and self-determination is about the many varied decisions that we make to compose and journey toward ourselves, about the audacity and strength to proclaim, create and evolve into who we know ourselves to be."

From Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, by Janet Mock.

10. "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."

From Laverne Cox Talks Love, Healing And Pride, by Kevin Fallon.

11. "The only way I’m trying to influence people is to be more kind and compassionate with one another. That is the message that I’m sending out. I don't have an agenda. I'm not here to brainwash anyone. I want you to live your lives being exactly who you are. Be true to yourself. The most important thing is to be true to yourself."

From The Ellen Degeneres Show, by Ellen Degeneres.