Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMINGAfter 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.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
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 -
Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
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 -
The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
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 -
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
BARBARA DEMING -
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING -
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING -
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