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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

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

Diversity Peace Real
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

Anger Determination Healthy
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

Being Brotherhood Free Men
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

Destroying Emotion Giving
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

Able Antagonist Gains Real
Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
BARBARA DEMING

Action Doe Nice
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

Change Long Running
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

Lying Peace Thinking
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

Change Mind People
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

Cutting Harm Little People Revolution
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING

Attack Need People Rationalization
Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMING

Pulse Spiritual Stranger
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMING

Break Punishment Spirit
Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
BARBARA DEMING

Happen Live Moment Place Time
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING

Another Courage Nerve Surely
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

Doubt Jail Trying

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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