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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

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMING

Pulse Spiritual Stranger
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

Balance Believe Name
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

Experience Mean Men Name Simply
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

Anger Determination Thinking
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

Choices Enemy Thinking
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
BARBARA DEMING

Change Point Vengeanc
Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
BARBARA DEMING

Fear First Thinking
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
BARBARA DEMING

Liberation Movement Strength
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
I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others – even others better than I am.
BARBARA DEMING

Always Deep Judgment Obiient Sense
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
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 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
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING

Happen Life Live Our Surrounding
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING

Attack Need People Rationalization

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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