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.
BARBARA DEMINGThe 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.
BARBARA DEMINGLet me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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.
BARBARA DEMINGthere 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 DEMINGOur 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 DEMINGPunishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMINGThe 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.
BARBARA DEMINGTo resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMINGIt is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
BARBARA DEMINGNonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
BARBARA DEMINGWhat 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 DEMINGA liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
BARBARA DEMINGVengeance 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 DEMINGThe injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
BARBARA DEMINGWe 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 DEMINGThere should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMING