Quotes About Empowerment

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

Good teachers possess a capacity for connectedness. They are able to weave a complex web of connections among themselves, their subjects, and their students so that students can learn to weave a world for themselves.

Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts. When teachers depend on the coercive powers of law or technique, they have no authority at all.

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching's great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.

American democracy at its best is like that island of restored prairie. In a world where human diversity is often suppressed—where authoritarian regimes have kept people lined up like rows of cultivated corn, harvesting their labor and sometimes their lives to protect the interests of the state—the diversity that grows in a democracy delights the heart as well as the eye.

Democratic action depends upon…free spaces, where people experience a schooling in citizenship and learn a vision of the common good in the course of struggling for change. —Sara Evans and Harry Boyte, Free Spaces

Who's in Charge Here? When a congregation is profoundly clergy-centered—when the pedagogy consists of a clergyperson (performer) downloading information and inspiration to parishioners (audience)—the game is rigged. The theological message may be one of community, but the lived experience is one of dependence on an authority. Under those conditions, not much can be done to build the communal trust that allows compassion to flower, no matter how benign the leader is.

the movements that transform us, our relations, and our world emerge from the lives of people who decide to care for their authentic selfhood.

From first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take in all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.

If I can inspire someone to go in a positive way and pursue a dream, it can only be good.

Your abilities are unlimited. Nothing is impossible for you to accomplish, because you're sufficient in God's sufficiency (2 Corinthians 3:5).

you're invigorated with miracle-working ability.

They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that's a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure.

You shouldn't have to pay for your love with your bones and your flesh.

I'm often asked why I got out when so many didn't. I've mentioned the high school teacher who stopped me in the hall for my assistance in a school performance. Before that man, whose name is Stan Asher, no one had ever looked at me or spoken to me as though I had value. For me, that's the key. Otherwise, I probably would have gone on believing that I was intrinsically bad, with nothing to offer. I believe that many in that house were never offered a positive image of themselves.

You don't form teams; you build them.

High performance teams escape the gravitational force of group-think. They develop high levels of trust among team members as well as in their communication processes. Defensive mechanisms are left behind in the pursuit of the most creative and productive courses of action.

I wasn't wearing war paint. But that didn't matter. I didn't need war paint. I was a different person than I had been, back then.

It's easier to apologize than ask for permission.

Don't let other people tell you what you want.

All you have been waiting for is your own permission.

Our role is to encourage, not discourage, reading.

guy raised his hand and asked if I had any advice when it came to "coaching women." I remember leveling him with a death ray stare and then relaxing and curling up the corner of my mouth and saying, "Don't worry about coaching 'women.' Just go home and coach 'basketball.' 

It's not that you should never love someone so much it can control you. It's that you need to love something that much so you can never be controlled. It's not a weakness- It's your best strength-