Quotations
From Notes
Quotations we've found helpful
Contents |
Marshall
"All violence is the result of people tricking themselves into believing that their pain derives from other people and that consequently those people deserve to be punished."
"The Nonviolent Communication process focuses on what's alive in us and what would make life more wonderful. What's alive in us are our needs, and I'm talking about the universal needs, the ones all living creatures have. Our feelings are simply a manifestation of what is happening with our needs. If our needs are being fulfilled, we feel pleasure. If our needs are not being fulfilled, we feel pain. Now, this does not exclude the analytic. I simply differentiate between life-serving analysis and life-alienated analysis... Analysis is a problem only when it gets disconnected from serving life."
"When we hear the other person's feeling and needs, we recognize our common humanity."
"A need is life seeking expression within us."
"I never have to worry about another person's response, only how I react to what they say."
"Please do as I request ONLY if you can do so with the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck."
"Please please please, do not do as I request if there is any of the following mixed in, even in the tiniest degree. Any fear of punishment if you dont. Any doing it for reward that I'll like you better if you do. Out of any shame, or guilt, of duty or obligation. Life is too short for us to do anything for each other with any taint like that mixed into the giving."
Violence and Nonviolence
"I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary, the evil it does is permanent".
Observing and Observation
"You can observe a lot just by watching"
"The highest form of intelligence is to observe without evaluating"
Blame and Judgement
"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
"Appreciate you without judging. Join you without invading. Invite you without demanding. Leave you without guilt."
Interconnectedness and Compassion
"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web he does to himself. All things are bound together. All things interconnect".
"O, Great Spirit, open my eyes, open heart's wings, open my ears to your voice in all things."
Namaste. I honor the place in you where the entire universe resides. A place of light, of love, of truth, of peace, of wisdom. I honor the place in you where when you are in that place, and I am in that place, there is only one of us.
"After all this time the sun never says to the earth 'You owe me' Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.
Empathy
"Empathy is full presence to what's alive in the other person at this moment."
Social and Personal change
"Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has."
"The world will change for the better when people decide that they are sick and tired of being sick and tired of the way the world is, and decide to change themselves".
"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going."
"Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
The Domination System, conditioning, habit
"Don't mix up that which is habitual with that which is natural."
"Gandhi said that very often we've been trained to communicate and act in ways that are quite unnatural, but they are habitual in the sense that we have been trained for various reasons to do it that way in our culture."
"It seems to me that whereas power usually means power-over, the power of some person or group over some other person or group, it is possible to develop the conception of power-with, a jointly developed power, a co-active, not a coercive power."
The kings and queens of ancient Sumer wanted writing to be used by professional scribes to record numbers of sheep owed in taxes, not by the masses to write poetry and hatch plots. As the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss put it, ancient writing's main function was "to facilitate the enlavement of other human beings".
Politics and War
from Sue Beardon
"If he that shared the danger enjoyed the profit, and, after bleeding in the battle, grew rich by the victory, he might show his gains without envy. But, at the conclusion of a ten years' war, how are we recompensed for the death of multitudes, and the expense of millions, but by contemplating the sudden glories of paymasters and agents, ontractors and commissaries, whose equipages shine like meteors, and whose palaces rise like exhalations!
These are the men who, without virtue, labour, or hazard, are growing rich, as their country is impoverished; they rejoice, when obstinacy or ambition adds another year to slaughter and devastation; and laugh, from their desks, at bravery and science, while they are adding figure to figure, and cipher to cipher, hoping for a new contract from a new armament, and computing the profits of a siege or tempest."
