Barbara Deming Quotes
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The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
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Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
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The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
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People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.
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Vengeance is not the point: change is.
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All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
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Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
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Balance and control come from healthy anger. This is just as aggressive as the unhealthy kind. But it is based on a belief and hope for change in social roles and institutions. Healthy anger demands change and creates the confrontations needed for change to occur. It also gives the other an opportunity to help make that change. “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 fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
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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, turn out, if we listen well, to be our stories also.
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Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
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A great many of us must move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
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To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience. Nonviolent actions does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences. Nor does it have to petition those in power to do something about a situation. It can face the authorities with a new fact and say: Accept this new situation which we have created.
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Something seems wrong to most people engaged in struggle when they see more people hurt on their own side than on the other side. They are used to reading this as an indication of defeat, and a complete mental readjustment is required of them. Within the new terms of struggle, victory has nothing to do with their being able to give more punishment than they take (quite the reverse); victory has nothing to do with their being able to punish the other at all; it has to do simply with being able, finally, to make the other move... Vengeance is not the point; change is.
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We cannot live without our lives
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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 fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.
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Of course it can be said of jails, too, that they try - by punishing the troublesome - to deter others. No doubt, in certain instances this deterrence actually works. But generally speaking it fails conspicuously.
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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
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there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one's whole being in the determination: this must change.
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I think the only choice that will enable us to hold to our vision. . . is one that abandons the concept of naming enemies and adopts a concept familiar to the nonviolent tradition: naming behavior that is oppressive.
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Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community.
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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 should be cut off from the rest of society as little as possible.
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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 the enemy coincide.
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We believe, in fact, that the one act of respect has little force unless matched by the other - in balance with it... The acting out of that dual respect I would name as precisely the source of our power.
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most Americans are in deep awe of things-as-they-are. Even with everything this obviously out of control, they still tell themselves that those in authority must know what they are doing, and must be describing our condition to us as it really is; they still take it for granted that somehow what is, what is done, must make sense, can't really be insane. These assumptions exercise a tyranny over their minds.
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To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.
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There should be no censorship of mail.
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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 is so to act that one can master them now.
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Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.
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