Top 40 Sarah Schulman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The title of this book, Conflict Is Not Abuse, recommends mutual accountability in a culture of underreaction to abuse and overreaction to conflict.”

— Sarah Schulman

2. “Nothing disrupts dehumanization more quickly than inviting someone over, looking into their eyes, hearing their voice, and listening.”

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

4. “Sometimes a person has to stop talking about art for a moment and take a look around.”

— Sarah Schulman

5. “Any pain that human beings can create, human beings can transcend.”

— Sarah Schulman

6. “If a person cannot solve a conflict with a friend, how can they possibly contribute to larger efforts for peace? If we refuse to speak to a friend because we project our anxieties onto an email they wrote, how are we going to welcome refugees, immigrants, and the homeless into our communities? The values required for social repair are the same values required for personal repair.”

— Sarah Schulman

7. “People see themselves as ‘succeeding’ because they are individually exceptional – they don’t see that there is a mechanism that has made it possible for them.”

— Sarah Schulman

8. “The drag queens who started Stonewall are no better off today, but they made the world safe for gay Republicans. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but the people who make change are not the people who benefit from it.”

— Sarah Schulman

9. “Differentiating between Power Struggle and Power Over,” Hodes explained, “is the difference between Conflict and Abuse.” Abuse is Power Over and Conflict is Power Struggle.”

— Sarah Schulman

10. “I want to be a witness to my own time because I’ve had a sneaking suspicion lately that I’m gonna live a lot longer than most of the people I meet. If I’m gonna be the only one still around to say what happened, I’d better pay close attention now.”

— Sarah Schulman

11. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

12. “The past is never dead. It is not even past.” – WILLIAM FAULKNER.”

— Sarah Schulman

13. “The traumatized person’s sense of their ability to protect themselves has been damaged or destroyed. They feel endangered, even if there is no actual danger in the present, because in the past they have experienced profoundly invasive cruelty and they know it is possible.”

— Sarah Schulman

14. “I’ve noticed throughout my long life that people with vested interest in things staying the way they are regularly insist that both change and accountability are impossible.”

— Sarah Schulman

15. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

16. “Which kind of safety are we endorsing here? Is it the safety from psychological “power over” and actual harm? Or is it the safety from being made uncomfortable by accurate information that challenges one’s self-perception?”

— Sarah Schulman

17. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

18. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

19. “You have to notice the truth in order to be able to avoid it.”

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

21. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

22. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

23. “With the exception of those natural disasters that are not caused by human misdeed, most of the pain, destruction, waste, and neglect towards human life that we create on this planet and beyond, are consequences of our overreaction to difference.”

— Sarah Schulman

24. “Since Freud, people think you either want to be a man or hate men. You only exist in relationship to men.”

— Sarah Schulman

25. “We should lower the bar for what must happen in a person’s life for their suffering to be acknowledged. “The current paradigm is encouraging all of us to think we are in abusive relationships,” Hodes explained. “And if you are not in an abusive relationship, you don’t deserve help. Being ‘abused’ is what makes you ‘eligible.’ But everyone deserves help when they reach out for it.”

— Sarah Schulman

26. “When there is no context for justice, freedom-seeking behavior is seen as annoying. Or futile. Or a drag. Or oppressive. And dismissed and dismissed and dismissed and dismissed until that behavior is finally just not seen.”

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

28. “My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.”

— Sarah Schulman

29. “When one party has been significantly hurt by the violent behaviors of parents, long before becoming half of a couple in adulthood, sometimes the partner is made to take responsability for the damage done by the parents. The partner is then charged with creating the fantastical ‘safe space”.”

— Sarah Schulman

30. “My readers are 90 percent gay, and it’s who I write for. I am not here to entertain straight people.”

— Sarah Schulman

31. “Breezy journalistic sentences about wealthy white people unaware that other human beings are real became the rubber stamp product of the elite MFA programs.”

— Sarah Schulman

32. “MFA programs are to the world of art what gentrification is to your neighborhood.”

— Sarah Schulman

33. “Then they went on to discuss other things because there is always something more to a person than what somebody else does to them.”

— Sarah Schulman

34. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

35. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

36. “The wind smelled clean, like clean magazines. It smelled like invisible ink.”

— Sarah Schulman

37. “Anti-violence politics, along with other revolutionary impulses, changed from a focus on working to transform patriarchy, racism, and poverty to cooperation and integration with the police. This has proven to be a significant turn because the police are, ironically, the embodiment of patriarchy, racism, and the enforcement of the US class system. John.”

— Sarah Schulman

38. “No one with power in America “comes around.” They always have to be forced into positive change.”

— Sarah Schulman

39. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

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

— Sarah Schulman

43. “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.”

— Sarah Schulman

44. “I am not here to entertain straight people.”

— Sarah Schulman