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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

LyingPeaceThinking

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More Barbara Deming Quotes

• 

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

  BARBARA DEMING
  AttackNeedPeopleRationalization
• 

  We cannot live without our lives

  BARBARA DEMING
  HappenLifeLiveOurSurrounding
• 

  A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.

  BARBARA DEMING
  GreatMenMovingObedience
• 

  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.

  BARBARA DEMING
  ExperienceMeanMenNameSimply
• 

  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
  ChoicesEnemyThinking
• 

  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.

  BARBARA DEMING
  DestroyingEmotionGiving
• 

  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 DEMING
  DiversityPeaceReal
• 

  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
  ChangeLongRunning
• 

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

  BARBARA DEMING
  MenMovingTactic
• 

  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.

  BARBARA DEMING
  BeingBrotherhoodFreeMen
• 

  It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.

  BARBARA DEMING
  AbleAntagonistGainsReal
• 

  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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• 

  Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

  BARBARA DEMING
  BreakPunishmentSpirit
• 

  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
  DoubtJailTrying
• 

  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
  CuttingHarmLittlePeopleRevolution
• 

  Vengeance is not the point: change is.

  BARBARA DEMING
  ChangePointVengeanc