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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

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More Barbara Deming Quotes

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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.

  BARBARA DEMING
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• 

  Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.

  BARBARA DEMING
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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.

  BARBARA DEMING
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• 

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

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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.

  BARBARA DEMING
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• 

  Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

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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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• 

  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.

  BARBARA DEMING
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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.

  BARBARA DEMING
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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 injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

  BARBARA DEMING
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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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• 

  Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.

  BARBARA DEMING
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• 

  Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

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• 

  After the revolution, let us hope, prisons simply would not exist – if by prisons we mean places that could be experienced by the men and women in them at all as every place that goes by that name now is bound to be experienced.

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• 

  Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

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