“This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.”

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.

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.

Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

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.

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.

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.

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

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.

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?

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

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

Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

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.

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.

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.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.