34 quotes
History is the story we tell ourselves about how the past explains our present, and how the ways in which we tell it are shaped by contemporary needs.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
it's essential that we understand this: every struggle is an ecological struggle.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Recovery from trauma requires creating and telling another story about the experience of violence and the nature of the participants, a story powerful enough to restore a sense of our own humanity to the abused.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
In the work I do, repetition is a method, a rhythm of meaning that must be maintained, a beat to my message. ("Libation")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Of every proposal for any kind of social action I ask whether it will increase the sum of human solidarity, because solidarity is the antidote to oppression, which always seeks to dehumanize and divide us.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
To live a lifetime of audacity, dwelling in the place where joy meets justice, year after year, can only be sustained by being so in love with a vision of what's possible that we no longer flirt with despair.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Deciding that we are in fact accountable frees us to act. ("Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
I believe that we have it in us to rise to this moment, to end the failed experiment of greed, restore the streams of our creative power, and establish a global culture of reciprocity and generosity as the beating heart of human life on earth.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Torturers are made, not born. We know enough about the repetitive cycles of violence, enough about the training of secret police and death squads, special military units and spies to know that the way you learn to torture is by being tortured.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Earth-centered cultures everywhere held our kinship with land and animals and plants as core knowledge, central to living. The land had to be soaked with blood and that knowledge, those cultures shattered, before private ownership could be erected. It wasn't just theft.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
We who believe in freedom, whose daily lives are made up of the clash between what we want for this world and the violent greed that surrounds us, need a culture rich in our people's dreams to keep us sane.
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
European Americans in this country need to find out against whom their whiteness has been structured, both historically and in the present. ("Raícism: Rootedness as Spiritual and Political Practice")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)
Unnecessarily specialized language is used to humiliate those who are not supposed to feel entitled. It sells the illusion that only those who can wield it can think. ("Certified Organic Intellectual")
Medicine Stories: Essays for Radicals (1998)