Quotes from Marshall B. Rosenberg

Never hear what a jackal-speaking person thinks, especially what they think about you.

Staying with empathy we allow speakers to touch deeper levels of themselves.

I believe that the most joyful and intrinsic motivation human beings have for taking any action is the desire to meet our needs and the needs of others.

Postpone result/solution thinking until later; it's through connection that solutions materialize - empathy before education.

We are dangerous when we are not conscious of our responsibility for how we behave, think, and feel.

Fear of corporal punishment obscures children's awareness of the compassion underlying the parent's demands.

When we make mistakes, we can use the process of NVC mourning and self-forgiveness to show us where we can grow instead of getting caught up in moralistic self-judgments.

NVC self-forgiveness: connecting with the need we were trying to meet when we took the action that we now regret.

when people hear anything that sounds like criticism, they tend to invest their energy in self-defense or counterattack. If we wish for a compassionate response from others, it is self-defeating to express our needs by interpreting or diagnosing their behavior. Instead, the more directly we can connect our feelings to our own needs, the easier it is for others to respond to us compassionately.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

there is considerably less violence in cultures where people think in terms of human needs than in cultures where people label one another as "good" or "bad" and believe that the "bad" ones deserve to be punished. In

Our attention is focused on classifying, analyzing, and determining levels of wrongness rather than on what we and others need and are not getting.

All criticism, attack, insults, and judgments vanish when we focus attention on hearing the feelings and needs behind a message. The more we practice in this way, the more we realize a simple truth: behind all those messages we've allowed ourselves to be intimidated by are just individuals with unmet needs appealing to us to contribute to their well-being.

With every choice you make, be conscious of what need it serves.

This world is what we have made of it. If it is ruthless today it is because we have made it ruthless by our attitudes. If we change ourselves we can change the world, and changing ourselves begins with changing our language and methods of communication. I highly recommend reading this book and applying the Nonviolent Communication process it teaches. It is a significant first step toward changing our communication and creating a compassionate world. –Arun Gandhi

MBR: In my lifetime I've been called a multitude of names, yet I can't recall seriously learning anything by being told what I am. I'd like to learn from your appreciation and enjoy it, but I would need more information.

As is often the case, these groups were more skilled in analyzing the perceived wrongness of others than in clearly expressing their own needs.

While we may not consider the way we talk to be "violent," words often lead to hurt and pain, whether for others or ourselves. In

my partner wants more affection than I'm giving her, she is "needy and dependent." But if I want more affection than she is giving me, then she is "aloof and insensitive.

We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves:

if readers have a sincere desire to make life miserable for themselves, they might learn to compare themselves to other people. For those unfamiliar with this practice, he provides a few exercises. The first one displays full-length pictures of a man and a woman who embody ideal physical beauty by contemporary media standards. Readers are instructed to take their own body measurements, compare them to those superimposed on the pictures of the attractive specimens, and dwell on the differences.

We only feel dehumanized when we get trapped in derogatory images of other people or thoughts of wrongness about ourselves. As author and mythologist Joseph Campbell suggested, "'What will they think of me?' must be put aside for bliss." We begin to feel this bliss when messages previously experienced as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain.

NVC heightens our awareness that what others say and do may be the stimulus, but never the cause, of our feelings. We see that our feelings result from how we choose to receive what others say and do, as well as from our particular needs and expectations in that moment. With this third component, we are led to accept responsibility for what we do to generate our own feelings.

Many people in fact have very negative associations with needs. They associate needs with being needy, dependant, selfish, and again I think that comes from our history of educating people to fit well into domination structures so that they are obedient and submissive to authority.