Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
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.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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.
BARBARA DEMING -
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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 -
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
BARBARA DEMING -
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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 -
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
There should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMING