Top 50 Adrienne Maree Brown Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Liberated relationships are one of the ways we actually create abundant justice, the understand that there is enough attention, care, resource, and connection for all of us to access belonging, to be in our dignity, and to be safe in community.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

2. “Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

3. “We are socialized to see what is wrong, missing, off, to tear down the ideas of others and uplift our own. To a certain degree, our entire future may depend on learning to listen, listen without assumptions or defenses.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

4. “I think it is healing behavior, to look at something so broken and see the possibility and wholeness in it.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

5. “Loretta Ross teaches us that, “When people think the same idea and move in the same direction, that’s a cult. When people think many different ideas and move in one direction, that’s a movement.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

6. “If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there’s no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea – but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

7. “Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

8. “Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. i suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

9. “I believe that all organizing is science fiction – that we are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

10. “In a fractal conception, I am a cell-sized unit of the human organism, and I have to use my life to leverage a shift in the system by how I am, as much as with the things I do. This means actually being in my life, and it means bringing my values into my daily decision making. Each day should be lived on purpose.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

11. “What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

12. “Ultimately, love for the self is the deepest pleasure we deny ourselves. I work daily to be courageous enough to indulge in the purest pleasure of self-love.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

13. “I have seen, over and over, the connection between tuning in to what brings aliveness into our systems and bring able to access personal, relational and communal power. Conversely, I have seen how denying our full, complex selves – denying our aliveness and our needs as living, sensual beings – increases the chance that we will be at odds with ourselves, our loved ones, our coworkers, and our neighbors on this planet.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

14. “I touch my own skin, and it tells me that before there was any harm, there was miracle.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

15. “We have experienced what it’s like to release any assumption that one person has all the skills needed to lead and support the work.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

16. “I believe that we are in an imagination battle, and almost everything about how we orient toward our bodies is shaped by fearful imaginations. Imaginations that fear Blackness, brownness, fatness, queerness, disability, difference. Our radical imagination is a tool for decolonization, for reclaiming our right to shape our lived reality.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

17. “We need to learn how to practice love such that care – for ourselves and others – is understood as political resistance and cultivating resilience.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

18. “Fiction that centers those who are currently marginalized – not to be nice, but because those who survive on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative – practicing survival-based efficiency, doing the most with the least, an important skill area on a planet whose resources are under assault by less marginalized people.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

19. “There is no way to repress pleasure and expect liberation, satisfaction, or joy.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

20. “Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

21. “Pleasure is the point. Feeling food is not frivolous, it is freedom.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

22. “No one is special, and everyone is needed.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

23. “Science fiction, particularly visionary fiction, is where I go when I need the medicine of possibility applied to the trauma of human behavior.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

24. “I believe our imaginations – particularly the parts of our imaginations that hold what we most desire, what brings us pleasure, what makes us scream yes – are where we must seed the future, turn toward justice and liberation, and reprogram ourselves to desire sexually and erotically empowered lives.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

25. “It has meant getting in touch with my body and feelings in real time, and learning to express them. I am learning to engage in generative conflict, to say no, to feel my limits, taking time to feel my heartache when it comes – from living in America, from interpersonal trauma or grief, from movement losses.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

26. “I believe that we are part of a natural world that is constantly changing, and we need to learn to adapt together and stay in relationship if we hope to survive as a species.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

27. “Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography. Losing our imagination is a symptom of trauma. Reclaiming the right to dream the future, strengthening the muscle to imagine together as Black people, is a revolutionary decolonizing activity.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

28. “In her essay “On the Issue of Roles,” Toni Cade explains that if we want to have a revolution, we have to craft revolutionary relationships, in action, not simply in rhetoric.56 She explains that a revolution cannot be created by conforming to existing roles in relationships already defined by the systems we want to overthrow. We have to practice creating new relationships.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

29. “We also learn that love is a limited resource and that the love we want and need is too much, that we are too much. We learn to shrink, to lie about the whole love we need, settling with not quite good enough in order to not be alone.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

30. “What is the freedom and accountability that accrues when “sister” is not just a static identity that you have but is something that you do or don’t do, with consequences. What happens when I apply that to all of my relationships? What happens if we replace the roles patriarchy has scripted us into with actions guided by what we want to create instead?”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

31. “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves. 25.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

32. “But if we want to create a world in which conflict and trauma aren’t the center of our collective existence, we have to practice something new, ask different questions, access again our curiosity about each other as a species.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

33. “I want us to ask who benefits from our hopelessness, and to deny our oppressors the satisfaction of getting to see our pain. I want them to wonder how we foment such consistent and deep solidarity and unlearning. I want our infiltrators to be astounded into their own transformations, having failed to tear us apart.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

34. “Pleasure activists believe that by tapping into the potential goodness in each of us we can generate justice and liberation, growing a healing abundance where we have been socialized to believe only scarcity exists.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

35. “I want our movement to feel like a vibrant, accountable space where causing harm does not mean you are excluded immediately and eternally from healing, justice, community, or belonging.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

36. “Pleasure is not one of the spoils of capitalism. It is what our bodies, our human systems, are structured for; it is the aliveness and awakening, the gratitude and humility, the joy and celebration of being miraculous.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

37. “This is relationship building. And this is building trust. And consensually understanding how to be moved and inspired by each other without sometimes assuming that energy has to be sexual. That maybe that’s just an erotic exchange that’s actually about sharing knowledge, memory, power, and that to me is understanding levels of intimacy in relationship to liberation.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

38. “God is one answer to our need to explain ourselves, to make sense of ourselves. But the moment you just accept yourself, then no explanation is needed, and god is everything together and nothing in particular.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

39. “She felt the night air on her, pretending she was somewhere else, in some other time. She often did this before she did something reckless. Her hope was that, if she died, her soul would travel to the last beautiful place she imagined.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

40. “Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

41. “I will not be perfect, I will keep learning. I will also not be silent, I will keep learning.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

42. “What we need right now is a radical, global love that grows from deep within us to encompass all life.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

43. “Accountability isn’t punishment, though it is frequently wielded as such.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

44. “Online, we perform solidarity for strangers rather than engaging in hard conversations with comrades.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

45. “Right now, call outs are being used not just as a necessary consequence for those wielding power to cause harm or enact abuse, but to shame and humiliate people in the wake of misunderstandings, contradictions, conflicts, and mistakes.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

46. “Instant judgment and punishment are practices of power over others.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

47. “I want us to see individual acts of harm as symptoms of systemic harm, and to do what we can do collectively to dismantle the systems and get as many of us free as possible.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

48. “We are afraid of being hurt, afraid because we have been hurt, afraid because we have caused hurt, afraid because we live in a world that wants to hurt us whether we have hurt others or not, just based on who we are, on any otherness from some long-ago determined norm.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

49. “Are you actively practicing generosity and vulnerability in order to make the connections between you and others clear, open, available, durable? Generosity here means giving of what you have without strings or expectations attached. Vulnerability means showing your needs.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown

50. “I have learned the difference between intolerable feelings and intolerable conditions.”

— Adrienne Maree Brown