Quotes About Vulnerability

but when you're insecure, your greatest asset becomes your greatest threat. Comparison will sabotage your destiny by undermining your integrity.

We're the richest nation in the world and everybody wants what we've got. And the minute we look soft, the would-be aggressors will go wild.

We take the piss out of someone else because it makes us feel better about the stuff that's screwing us up.

It is harder to defend a computer than to attack it.

When we apologize and confess to others, we communicate that we do not think we are superior, while we also communicate that there are standards by which we are seeking to live.

I didn't judge; it was as if that were part of my purpose: I wanted to know the men who moved through my nights like passing comets, wanted them to feel the pleasure of being known.

Judy, of course, doesn't stand in the ruins; she is the ruin. In this way she enthralled a generation of gay men, singing her way out of suffering while still bearing the inescapable marks of damage.

we were unprepared for how some people in our lives had the potential to behave. If their behavior caused us to flip into a state of emotional pain, then we quite naturally would have felt betrayed.

When we stop distancing ourselves from the pain in the world, our own or others, we create the possibility of a new experience, one that often surprises because of how much joy, connection, or relief it yields. Destruction may continue, but humanity shines through.

Loud noises, bright lights, the motion of a passing car, all made him swoon.

Dude, you're scaring the crap out of me,' said Nick. 'I'm serious, I literally have no crap right now.

Don't be afraid of sharing your vulnerabilities. Vulnerability doesn't make you weak, it makes you accessible. Know that your vulnerability can be your strength. —KEITH FERRAZZI, AUTHOR, WHO'S GOT YOUR BACK

Conceal a flaw, and the world will imagine the worst. —MARCUS VALERIUS MARTIAL, ROMAN POET

Inside every person is a real person. Who is just as afraid or nervous or in need of empathy as anyone else. Make a person feel felt.

Both partners describe one of their own character flaws. Humility resolves self-righteousness.

Church is the place to be broken together.

We take a beautiful little boy and we put him in a diaper and we give him a lethal weapon and we say LOVE. Which makes absolutely no sense.

He could say nothing. He had no right to be there, he had already been profoundly changed, he was no good at small talk, she was half naked, it was dawn and he loved her.

We are trapped in the jaws of something shaking the life out of us." With these words from his historical novel, Philadelphia Fire, John Edgar Wideman conveys a sense of what it means to be caught out on stage, vulnerable at the point of having one's life taken, shaken out, by what I have term "the theatrics of state terror." Wideman's

Today, the links between young black, brown, or poor people and mass incarceration are all the more startling and fearsome. We now have the documented reality of the "school-to-prison pipeline" that often gives up on excellence of education and a professional future for America's racialized poor, and then "tracks" them into jobs and communities where vulnerability enhances the likelihood of warehousing in prison.

fact, there is a strong element of intentionality here on the part of leaders in forming prison policy. At high levels of planning officials have even advocated procedures for breaking down inmates, making them especially vulnerable to the routinizing of time. They

According to Spitzer, social junk refers to those whom the state sees as beaten so far down, so nearly destroyed, that they just need to be moved aside. In the U.S., these include the mentally ill, drug addicts, lonely and frayed drifters, alcoholics, and cast-off impoverished elders.

I cite here, again, Gilmore's definition: "Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.

Second, carceral terror, by implanting fear in the incarcerated, often returns persons broken by fear into their communities. I stressed in the first edition of this book that systems of punitive terror create through brutal prison culture a certain number of predators that often return to the streets, increasing the vulnerabilities of poor neighborhoods.