Emergent Strategy Quotes

“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, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

“Emergence emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, listening with all the senses of the body and the mind.”
― Adrienne Marie Brown

“Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space. The facilitator can be a gardener, or the sun, the water.”
― Adrienne Marie Brown

“When I am feeling fragmented or limited, seeing any of my friends in their wholeness reminds me of my own capacity. And as I stand in my wholeness, which includes being more honest with myself and others about what I want and who I am in the world, it exerts a pressure on others, both to receive me and to become more whole in themselves. This disrupts those familiar diminishing patterns in my friends and in myself, the internalization of a world that has rejected every aspect of my identity at some point.”
― Adrienne Marie Brown

“Emergent strategy is a way that all of us can begin to see the world in life-code—awakening us to the sacred systems of life all around us.”
― Adrienne Marie Brown

“I picked up [the term 'pleasure activism'] from harm reductionist Keith Cylar, who I met only briefly before he passed on April 5, 2004 after twenty years of living with HIV. Initially, pleasure activism was about claiming our right to experience pleasure, to be safe and respected in the pleasures we choose.

It was expanded for me over the years as I have come to believe that facts, guilt, and shame are limited motivations for creating change, even though those are the primary forces we use in our organizing work. I suspect that to really transform our society, we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.”
― adrienne marie brown

“Build your dream on the principles of an Emergent Strategy, so you are not defined by the crises of an Emergency Strategy.”
― Ludmila Morozova-Buss

“Anchor your dream in Emergent Strategy, not the crises of an Emergency Strategy.”
― Ludmila Morozova-Buss

“Epistemic humility limits certainty, plasticity enables change, but only coherence across time permits intelligence to move toward truth without disolving itself.”
― Kayambila Mpulamasaka