Barbara Deming Quotes

34 quotes in 493 categories

• We learn best to listen to our own voices if we are listening at the same time to other women-whose stories, for all our differences,…
• I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies…
• The free man must be born before freedom can be won, and the brotherly man must be born before full brotherhood can be won. It…
• The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point…
• Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in…
• It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
• To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
• We cannot live without our lives
• Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
• Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing…
• All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
• Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.
• After the revolution, it might very well remain necessary to place people where they could not do harm to others. But the one under restraint…
• After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist - if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men…
• Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain…
• Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
• The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
• There should be no censorship of mail.
• This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
• We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting…

Browse Barbara Deming Quotes by Category