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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.

Barbara Deming

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

Happen Live Moment Place Time
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
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMING

Break Punishment Spirit
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING

Need Speak Violent
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. But the trouble is that in most people’s minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.
BARBARA DEMING

Change Mind People
A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING

Great Men Moving Obedience
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
BARBARA DEMING

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

Our People Prison Society
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

Destroying Emotion Giving
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
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

Injunction Mean Neighbor Ourselves
The longer we listen to one another – with real attention – the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.
BARBARA DEMING

Diversity Peace Real
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

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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