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Quotes from Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair — Sarah Schulman

born 1958 United States

← All quotes by Sarah Schulman

29 quotes

Privilege has always been a dulling factor in one’s comprehension of human difference.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Suicide is often a failure of community, and claiming it as inevitable is a defense against that failure.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Politics is a consequence of how a person understands their experience.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

All human beings, by virtue of being born, deserve care, recognition, protection, fairness, and opportunity.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

We should not isolate, denounce, and punish people for being human.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

People need interactive conversations, even short ones, in order to understand each other.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

People do things for reasons, even if they don’t know what those reasons are.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

All human beings deserve to be heard and considered.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

If someone wishes to alter a relationship, they must discuss it with the other person, negotiate the change, and listen to the other person’s account. There is no ethical way around it.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Growing up with chaos can make it harder to know how to create order as an adult.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

No answer is not an answer. It is unreasonable to expect other people to interpret our silences.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

There is no correlation between having the ability to punish and being right. More often than not, the wrong people get punished. And the punishers use their power to keep from being accountable.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

The business of psychological studies is a messy one. There are so many and they contradict each other, but like poetry, they can stimulate thought.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

In the embodiment of the good group, through the therapist, a person can be helped to understand their own motivations, reactions, and choices, to achieve an ongoing desire for awareness.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

There are options, and even though anxiety may make the reality of choices elusive, they still exist. Recognize the existence of the anxiety, then strive to overcome it in order to perceive other options.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Part of peace-making is acknowledging that we can’t know everything about ourselves, and sometimes we reveal things to others that we are not ready to accept.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

While unrecovered trauma is so often a prison of inflexibility, some people do have choices about how to respond. And someone else might make that shift possible by daring to imagine what to us may feel unimaginable. Which can be love.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

The privileged are often good at articulating injury but not always able to identify if they are actually experiencing it. There is a difference in being able to recognize the conditions under which injury has or is happening, and actually living, or having lived through it.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

We are suffering, and if we could all acknowledge that suffering has content, we could all understand, as a community, somewhat better how to help each other.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Feminism, or full and complete personhood for women, is an idea. And each human being has to do the work to explore it, build a relationship to it, and understand what their own changes must be in order to be part of it.

Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair (2016)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sarah Schulman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.