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 DEMINGNonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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Vengeance is not the point: change is.
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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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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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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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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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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
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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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A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
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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.
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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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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 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 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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A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
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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.
BARBARA DEMING