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 DEMINGthere is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one’s whole being in the determination: this must change.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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.
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 -
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
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 -
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 -
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 -
Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING -
Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
BARBARA DEMING -
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.
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 -
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 -
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 -
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
BARBARA DEMING