Rib Hillis quotes:

Hateful people put fear in other people.

I always felt safe and protected. My dad is 6'6" and 280 pounds, so I basically felt protected, and I aspire to have my kids feel the same way.

I have 8-year-old twins, and I want them to grow up in a world where they can be anyone they want without any shame, without holding back, without being judged for it.

Picking on another person in their mind justifies and makes their stature higher. People do it interracially. It's amazing how every race, every culture seems to have a culture they pick on.

You can have your beliefs and have your faith, but don't try to impose it one me, and vice versa.

Even though [bullying] doesn't actually raise your stature, it might make you feel that way.

I can imagine that if you're a kid growing up somewhere, where you might be gay or you think you're gay, but you don't know who else would be ... you become very closeted.

I think bullying comes from a person's feeling of self-worth, and so what you do is you find out where you are in a totem pole, and you may slide in somewhere in the middle. So you say, "OK, well there's all these other people who I respect and admire, and there's all these people below me, so I'm going to put on them this sense that they're inferior and I'm going to belittle them, and that's going to raise my stature."

I was very fortunate. I had a great group of friends in my life, and family, and so I felt a sense of safety and belonging that ... as you grow older, you realize that not everybody does feel that. And there's particular certain groups of kids who always feel like outsiders. But I was very fortunate.

I would encourage my children to protect themselves if there's any sort of physical abuse against them. I would definitely go speak to the perpetrator, and if the perpetrator was a child, I'd speak to their parents. But I ... Oh my God, I don't know what I'd do if I was privy to watching my kids being bullied! I would do what any parent would, I'd be like a grizzly bear protecting his cubs.

If you feel like you're not where you want to be in your life, rather than step on someone else's, raise your stature.

When I was younger, I had an older brother a year and a half older than me, so we always had each other, and I felt very fortunate in that regard.

You can't discriminate against someone because of their race, color, or religion, but you can discriminate against someone because of their sexual preference, I find it to be abhorrent.