# Safety

Safety is the absence of physical and psychological danger.

## Quotes

* Now, it is true that the nature of society is to create, among its citizens, an illusion of safety; but it is also absolutely true that the safety is always necessarily an illusion. Artists are here to disturb the peace.
** James Baldwin, "An interview with James Baldwin", (1961).
* When you have overcome one temptation, you must be ready to enter the lists with another. As distrust, in some sense, is the mother of safety, so security is the gate of danger. A man had need to fear this most of all, that he fears not at all.
** Thomas Brooks, p. 532; cited in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895).
* Choosing safety is a choice of life over career.
** Warren Farrell. Why Men Earn More, (2005): p. 35.
* “Restrictions on women’s mobility are often framed in terms of safety,” Dr. Khan said. Rather than trying to reduce harassment and violence, she said, male decision makers who hear about such problems often take the attitude that workplaces are unsafe, “so let’s keep women away from them.”
** Sarah Khan in "#MeToo Paradox: Movement Topples the Powerful, Not the Ordinary" by Amanda Taub. New York Times, (Feb. 11, 2019).
* In love the only safety is in flight
** Napoleon I of France, Napoleon : In His Own Words, (1916).
* Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger — according to the way you react to it.
** C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (1952).
* There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands.
** Theodore Roosevelt, A Square Deal, (1903).
* A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for.
** William Greenough Thayer Shedd attributed without citation in Gary Ninneman, C.I.A.: Church in Atrophy. (Xulon Press, (2006): p. 167.
* Feeling “safe” of course is already a problematic endeavor since there is little guarantee of safety in our world, and the promise of it is a false one, as the effort to enforce this is often at the expense of other people. Both Supremacists and the Traumatized may conceptualize themselves as “weak” or “endangered” unless others around them are controlled, repressed, punished, or destroyed. The concept of “safe space” can also be a projection in the present based on dangers that occurred in the past. It may have once been used for those living in illegality, like gay people, Jews, immigrants, or adults who now have agency but were oppressed as children. But now those of us who have become dominant continue to use this trope to repress otherness. It is used by the dominant to defend against the discomfort of hearing other people’s realities, to repress nuance, ignore multiple experiences, and reject the inherent human right to be heard. Instead, it may even be considered victimizing by the supremacist/traumatized person to not simply follow their orders when they “feel” or say that they “feel” endangered, even if that feeling is retrospective.
** Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. ISBN 9781551526447.
* Safety is an acquisition of power, often dependent on unjust structures of subjugation to satisfy the threatened person or group’s need for control. Normativity itself is dependent on the diminishment of others. We know now that determining punishment by the feelings of one party is the essence of injustice.
** Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2016. ISBN 9781551526447.
* Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem.
** The only safe course for the defeated is to expect no safety.
*** Virgil, Aeneid, II.354