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Aurora Levins Morales
170 quotes
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Healing takes place in community, in the telling and the bearing witness, in the naming of trauma and in the grief and rage and defiance that follow.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“While the false memory theoreticians attempt to establish that pain is ahistoric and traumas leave no trace of themselves in our lives, the traumatized keep finding ways to insist that pain has documentable origins, that when someone is hit, it hurts, and that injuries leave scars.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Racism frames violence within communities of color as inherent to our identities because it denies the cumulative impact of genocide, slavery, lynching, and other forms of organized violence, enforced poverty and segregation, and the systematic denial of opportunities. It is only by recognizing the traumatic impact of oppression that we come to see that all violence, all dysfunction arises from historical causes. It was the identification of those sources that radicalized former street gangs, giving rise to powerful movements like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Just as the individual recovering from abuse must reconstruct the story of her undeserved suffering in a way that gives it new meaning, and herself a rebuilt and invulnerable sense of worth, the victims of collective abuse need ways to reconstruct history that restore a sense of our inherent value as human beings and immunize us against the elite mythology that our only worth is in our ability to make them rich.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only through mourning can we reconnect to the love in our lives and lose our fascination with the ones who harmed us.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the first things a colonizing power, a new ruling class, or a repressive regime does is attack the sense of history of those they wish to dominate by attempting to take over and control their relationships to their own past...A strong sense of their own history among the dominated undermines the project of domination. It provides an alternative story, one in which oppression is the result of human behavior, of historical events and choices, and not natural law.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All historians have points of view. All of us use some process of selection by which we choose which stories we consider important and interesting. We do history from some perspective, within some particular worldview. Storytelling is not neutral. Curandera historians make this explicit, openly naming our partisanship, our intent to influence how people think.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Childhood is the one political condition, the one disenfranchised group through which all people pass. The one constituency of the oppressed in which all surviving members eventually stop being members and have the option of becoming administrators of the same conditions for new members.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The oppression of children is the wheel that keeps all other oppressions turning. Without it, misery would have to be imposed afresh on each new generation instead of being passed down like a hereditary illness. Children enter the world full of expectation and hope. They are not jaded. They are not cynical or resigned. They see clearly what custom has made invisible to us and are outraged by all injustices, no matter how small. It is through the agency of former children that the revolutionary potential of current children is held in check.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without any form of political representation, children remain in many senses the property of the adults in their lives.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Storytelling is a basic human activity, with which we simultaneously make and understand the world and our place in it.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“language is born from history.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the face of a widespread belief that domination is the most trustworthy answer to fear, I am fighting for both the freedom of Palestine and the souls of Jews.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How can you own something that changes under your hands, that is so fully alive? Ecology undermines ownership.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“national soil" is a nonsensical idea. Places have history, but soil does not have nationality. Just as the air we breathe has been breathed by millions of others first and will go on to be breathed by millions more; just as water falls, travels, evaporates, circulates moisture around the planet-so the land itself migrates.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ownership shatters ecology. For the land to survive, for us to survive, it must cease to be property. It cannot continue to sustain us for much longer under the weight of such a merciless use. We know this. We know the insatiable hunger for profit that drives that use and the disempowerment that accommodates it. We don't yet know how to make it stop.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A fully just society in which human potential is never despised or thrown away is possible only if that invitation to a restoration of integrity and community is always open.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of us have had failures of integrity. I believe part of what makes it so hard to consider perpetrators as part of our constituency is that we cannot bear to examine the ways we resemble them. Until we confront the moments when we have been co-opted, coerced or seduced into harming others, we will be vulnerable to defensive self-righteousness.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am holding out for a radical refusal to compromise on the possibility of any one of us to heal, make new moral choices, make amends, and reclaim kinship with those we have harmed. A justice that is truly restorative.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a place for righteous rage at the torturers and a place to demand accountability and hard work. But punishment is not a tool of liberation. It is the powerless exercise of violence by those who can think of nothing better. It is the refusal to acknowledge our kinship with those who hurt us. It is a laying down of our vision, and ultimately, if we cannot overcome the urge to punish, our vision, which is what truly distinguishes us from those we oppose, will die.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The concept of internalized oppression, that collective historical trauma has powerful and lasting effects on individuals and communities, provides the most important insights into the behavior of oppressed people. Seeing how internalized institutional abuse affects people's choices allows me to explain their actions as separate from their potential-to say that people make the best choices of which they are capable at any particular moment.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In order to successfully build a politics of inclusion, we need to map the ways in which our own thinking has been affected by our individual, familial, and cultural histories of oppression and resistance. The process of consciousness raising, of naming the specific ways in which our particular experiences of inequity traumatized us, is an invaluable theorizing tool. There are few things as powerful as identifying the manufacturer's mark on what we have perceived as our personal demons.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Full inclusion requires us to root out all the ways in which we have been tricked into collusion with the oppression of others, and all of us have. It requires us to move beyond our comfort zones. I once heard Bernice Reagon say that being in coalition meant working with people we didn't much like, and we might need to vomit over it for a while, but we had to do it anyway.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Solidarity is not a matter of altruism. Solidarity comes from the inability to tolerate the affront to our own integrity of passive or active collaboration in oppression of others, and from the deep recognition of our most expansive self-interest. From the recognition that, like it or not, our liberation is bound up with that of every other being on the planet, and that politically, spiritually, in our heart of hearts we know anything else is unaffordable.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Joy is to mood as stars are to the weather, a constant to steer by, sometimes hidden by storm clouds but high above them, untouched by wind or rain.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Trauma is not the opposite of joy; it's the husk around its seed. The more we face into the world, the more we let ourselves know how other people live, the more we learn about not only their pain and rage but also their love and resilience, their defiance and hope, and it's from that full spectrum of knowing that we fill in the details and colors of the world we want. There is a joy that rises from being with what's true, even when that truth includes the terrible.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Imagine that seeking the sources of audacity in our lives, choosing to know whatever we must to find it, we discover that there is nothing to defend. Whatever the harm done to us and the real wounds of it, our scars are not treasures to be hoarded. Whatever our complicity in the deprivation of others, whatever we've allowed ourselves, in the name of comfort or fear, to accept instead of freedom, is not worth having, that injustice was already here when we were born, that it's much bigger and older than our mistakes, that claiming each other is much better than lying low.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have tried to integrate healing myself and healing the world.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I understood that excavating and revealing the truth about my experiences of abuse, and the sense of empowerment and release that process brought me, was the same process as excavating and telling the truth about the centuries of invasion, enslavement, patriarchal rule, accommodation, collaboration and resistance. The healing came from the same source.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“abuse is the local eruption of systemic oppression, and oppression the accumulation of millions of small systematic abuses.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“However the abuse is perpetrated, the result is the same: abuse does not make sense in the context of our humanity, so when we are abused, we must either find an explanation that restores our dignity or we will at some level accept that we are less than human and lose ourselves, and our capacity to resist, in the experience of victimhood.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I call the work I do "cultural activism" because it does battle in the arena of culture, over the stories we tell ourselves and each other of why the world is as it is. It's a struggle for the imaginations of oppressed people, for our capacity to see ourselves as human when we are being treated inhumanely. Cultural activism is not separate from the work of organizing people to do specific things. In fact, successful organizing depends on this transformation of vision; the most significant outcome of most organizing campaigns is the transformation that takes place in people who participate.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reality is that when we are unable to mobilize people on their own behalf, the difficulty is usually at the level of vision. Either we ourselves have been unable to see the people with whom we are working as fully human and have treated them as victims instead of allies, or we have failed to engage their imaginations and spirits powerfully enough.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cultural work, the work of infusing people's imaginations with possibility, with the belief in a bigger future, is the essential fuel of revolutionary fire.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sustainable activism is not simply a matter of organizing energy and applying it to tasks. Anyone can do that in a crisis, in a pinch, for a while. Long-term activism requires more or less reliable, ongoing sources of hopefulness, faith, joy and trust because it is a matter of believing in and working for possibilities that are nowhere in sight.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we need to find ways to live as if what we want to build were already here.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The spiritual is whatever allows us to notice the miraculous nature of life, how it keeps coming back, asserting itself in the midst of destruction. Whatever allows us to notice that life is in fact bigger than all the mean-spirited cruelties and brutalities of unjust societies. Something large enough to entrust our sense of future to, so that we don't become mired in struggle.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our society is individualistic to the point of insanity. Concern for the common good is ridiculed as naive, and the skills of people from more communally oriented cultures are seen as liabilities.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Love is subversive, undermining the propaganda of narrow self-interest. Love emphasizes connection, responsibility and the joy we take in each other. Therefore love (as opposed to unthinking devotion) is a danger to the status quo and we have been taught to find it embarrassing.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art, like dreaming, is something so necessary to internal balance that people deprived of it go a little wacky. Art is the collective dreamplace, the reservoir of our deepest understandings and desires and hopes, as essential as water. In recognition of this fact, the marketplace offers us entertainment, hoping to replace the wild and forested interior of our souls with potted plastic plants. Just as we dream-whether we want to or not, whether we long for or fear our dreaming-people make art and are drawn to art.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every vital social movement immediately begins to generate art-songs, poetry, posters, murals, novels-an outpouring of the creativity that people will create from even the smallest crumbs of hope.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“art, like sex, is an essential and affirming part of aliveness, it cannot be totally repressed. So, as best they can, our rulers steal it, commodify it and return it in barely recognizable form, sanitized, rootless, artificial, or they try to medicate away the need, substituting addiction.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings seek integrity like water seeks its level, grow toward creative and just solutions like plants grow toward sunlight, sometimes by crooked paths, but always reaching.”
Aurora Levins Morales (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source