Quotes from Sarah Schulman

One of the organizing principles of gentrified thinking is to assess everyone based on what they can do for you, and then treat them accordingly.

All along, he had believed instinctually that his broken heart had something to do with the collapse of culture. He wanted to blame it on economics instead of on the fact that she was a fucking bitch.

Some people have sex by putting fishhooks in each other. Couple this act with a simple understanding of the basic function of all living creatures to expand and contract. Now, try that with fishhooks.

You tell them one real thing and then the doctor thinks he knows you. He starts getting arrogant and overfamiliar, making insulting suggestions left and right. You have to protest constantly just to set the record straight. Finally he makes offensive assumptions and throws them in your face. A stranger in a bar could do the same…

People who are being punished for doing nothing, for having normative conflict, or for resisting unjustified situations, need the help of other people.

In my view, the recognition that a person has distorted thinking that comes from or produces suffering is important, but it has no inherent implication for action. It doesn't imply medication, incarceration, or any particular brand of treatment. It just means stating openly that an internal conflict is not being resolved, is instead being expressed externally, and that those who did not cause the pain will be the ones to be blamed and to pay for it.

When I think about moving forward, in mutual recognition, towards resolution, I think about the word agreement. Not that we would hold the same views, but rather that we would communicate enough to agree on what each of our different views actually are.

Nowadays you have to pay a very high price to become a bohemian.

I have come to understand that the same action of unjustified escalation most often comes from one of two positions: Supremacy, or Trauma. And in realizing this, I am surprised by the similar behaviors expressed by these two divergent experiences.

Paying for your lover's funeral is the gay version of a bar mitzvah. It is how you know that you have become a man.

Resolution doesn't mean that everyone is happy, but it does mean that perhaps fewer people are being blamed for pain they have not caused, or being cast as the receptacle of other people's anxieties, so that fewer people are dehumanized by false accusation.

Any pain that human beings can create, human beings can transcend.

I am examining the inaccurate claiming of "abuse" as a substitute for problem-solving. I make plain how this deflection of responsibility produces unnecessary separation and perpetuates anxiety while producing cruelty, shunning, undeserved punishment, incarceration, and occupation.

Annihilation is a bad strategy, it gives the other nothing to lose.

People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste.

Do most gay women love each other?" Doc asked. "A lot of them love closeted movie stars.

The past is never dead. It is not even past." —WILLIAM FAULKNER

Perhaps because Supremacy in some produces Trauma in others, they can become mirror images.

As Will Burton says, "pain has a story, a narrative," and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves.

The law is designed to protect the state, not the people who are victimized by the state.

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.

Just as unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized individuals can collude with or identify with bullies, so can unresolved, formerly subordinated or traumatized groups of people identify with the supremacy of the state. In both cases, the lack of recognition that the past is not the present leads to the newly acquired power to punish rather than to the self-transformation necessary to resolve conflict and produce justice.

When we are in the realm of Conflict, we can move from the Abuse-based construction of perpetrator and victim to the more accurate recognition of the parties as the conflicted, each with legitimate concerns and legitimate rights that must be considered in order to produce just resolution.

There is no evidence that time heals all wounds, or even most wounds; instead, it freezes unnecessary enmity and makes it harder to overcome. (...) As Bertolt Brecht said, "As crimes pile up, they become invisible." And so I don't believe in an ideology of non-response.