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1. black
2. grey
3. blue
4. red
5. brown
6. white

What is the revolution that we need? We need to dissolve the lie that some people have a right to think of other people as their property. And we need at last to form a circle that includes us all, in which all of us are seen as equal… We do not belong to the other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others.

Barbara Deming

Related Topics

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More Barbara Deming Quotes

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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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• 

  Vengeance is not the point: change is.

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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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• 

  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 will come into being only if we build it out of our very muscle and bone – by trying to act it out.

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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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• 

  Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

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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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  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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• 

  People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

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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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• 

  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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• 

  Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

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  Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

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• 

  Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength? Who better than we should know all the power that resides in noncooperation?

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• 

  Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

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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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