Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMINGThe 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.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
-
-
A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING -
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING -
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
BARBARA DEMING -
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.
BARBARA DEMING -
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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.
BARBARA DEMING -
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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.
BARBARA DEMING -
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING