Social Healing Quotes

If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three inches, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and America hasn't even begun to pull out the knife.

I think sports is part of the healing process for society.

The love of the family, the love of one person can heal. It heals the scars left by a larger society. A massive, powerful society.

I looked at Willie Nelson and Farm Aid as a role model; they do it every year, and it draws people together, and drawing people together where they realize they're not alone, to me, is strategic in healing.

The work of #MeToo is about healing. It's about healing as individuals and healing as communities.

Ireland and its people have much to be proud of. Yet every land and its people have moments of shame. Dealing with the failures of our past, as a country, as a Church, or as an individual is never easy. Our struggle to heal the wounds of decades of violence, injury and painful memory in Northern Ireland are more than ample evidence of this.

It is not enough for the Church to be engaged with the State in healing social ills, though this is important at times. But when the world can turn around and see a group of God's people exhibiting substantial healing in the area of human relationships in their present life, then the world will take notice. Each group of Christians is, as it were, a pilot plant, showing that something can be done in the present situation, if only we begin in the right way.

Where the disease is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the Northern States it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the Southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process. That it may finally be effected and its progress hastened, will be my last and fondest prayer.

By healing the internal issues that we can heal as a people, our children don't have to suffer the same agony and pain that we put each other through.

In a neighborhood, as in life, a clean bandage is much, much better than a raw or festering wound.

Reconciliation is a long process. We don't have the kind of race clashes that we thought would happen. What we have is xenophobia, and it's very distressing. But maybe you ought to be lenient with us. We've been free for just 12 years.

The place to cure most of the ills of society is in the homes of the people.

The Department of Peace would take a more human approach to healing our society, looking not merely for ways we can destroy an enemy, but for more powerful ways to create new friends. While the State Department engages in international diplomacy, there is no domestic parallel. There is no department seeking to harness the power of a nonviolent heart.

We need to hear everyone. We need dialogue between police and the community. They're angry. They're hurt. A dialogue can cause a shift in consciousness in the person if he's understanding you and listening.

After voluntary exertions on the part of our people to which the history of the world furnishes no parallel, is the old root of bitterness still to remain in the ground, to sprout and bear fruit in the future as it has borne fruit in the past?

I see more people taking on the cloak of accountability, more people tiring of the blame game. If we are all connected and our actions in Australia affect us in Istanbul, then we are all to blame and all to be healers. We can't blame lawyers anymore for the 'liability' vs. common sense imbalance.

But now, I am also learning this: we can be mended. We mend each other.

We shall look on crime as a disease, and its physicians shall displace the judges, its hospitals displace the Galleys. Liberty and health shall be alike. We shall pour balm and oil where we formerly applied iron and fire; evil will be treated in charity, instead of in anger. This change will be simple and sublime.

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.

The wounds of my country will heal after the troubles of anarchy and bloody revolution.

Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

To cure the violence, we must identify and heal the causes of hatred and violence. If we don't deal with the causes we will never be safe.

We recall our terrible past so that we can deal with it, to forgive where forgiveness is necessary, without forgetting; to ensure that never again will such inhumanity tear us apart; and to move ourselves to eradicate a legacy that lurks dangerously as a threat to our democracy.

Sentiments of hate toward one another still permeate today's world, and there is still much work to be done to heal the divisions of racial prejudice.

What is happening in politics today is a similar process to what happened in the medical world a few decades ago: realizing that there's more to healing than just addressing symptoms. Primary paradigm when it comes to dealing with political and social disease is allopathic: Pass a law, lock someone up, engage in warfare. And the state of the world today makes it clear that such allopathic measures have not exactly brought peace to all.