Never Silent Quotes

“Show me an activist who is so overwhelmed by darkness that they can't feel joy, and I'll show you a useless activist. Grief and anger are powerful motivators. In our case, the sparked a movement and helped it grow. But it was sustained by a desperate need for community, happiness, and love.”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“We don’t know why some lived, and may never know, so we call it luck. There were no magic strategies or circumstances that consistently saved any of us.”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“I have never felt more alive and protected. I do not believe in god, but I witnessed something profoundly spiritual in those years: the power of collective empathy. Each of us is capable of it, possibly instilled by evolution. When members of a support group tap empathy together, wounds can be healed and lives can be saved. When a community taps it while under siege, history itself can be bent toward righteous victories.”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“and loving community. All of our emotions were heightened and intense, frustrating and beautiful at the same time. It was a bubble filled with demonstrations, endless meetings, nights of ecstasy and dancing, nights of wheat-pasting, hospitals and memorials, boyfriends, new friends, breakups, phone zaps, phone trees, shame-free sex, sex between proud sluts, sex that was political, that said fuck-you to the haters, more endless meetings, kiss-ins, kissing hello on the lips, kissing lesbians, selling T-shirts and buttons, covering an entire city in SILENCE = DEATH stickers, heckling presidents, getting arrested with your best friends, chanting,”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism

“Being a spokesperson for a movement is a tricky thing. Being one for a movement that bills itself as leaderless in even trickier. Do it badly, and you'll squander a major opportunity for the movement, and get skewered within the group. Do it well, and you'll be asked to do it again and again, and then resented for it, especially if you enjoy it like I did. And you will deserve the resentment when, like me, you were young and cocky and still lacking the political maturity to share the limelight with less represented members of your AIDS community. 110”
― Peter Staley, Never Silent: ACT UP and My Life in Activism