Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMINGPunishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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.
BARBARA DEMING -
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.
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Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMING -
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
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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.
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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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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
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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.
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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.
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There should be no censorship of mail.
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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.
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This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
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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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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
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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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We cannot live without our lives
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Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
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Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
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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.
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Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
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Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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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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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.
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The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
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Vengeance is not the point: change is.
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Gandhi once declared that it was his wife who unwittingly taught him the effectiveness of nonviolence. Who better than women should know that battles can be won without resort to physical strength? Who better than we should know all the power that resides in noncooperation?
BARBARA DEMING