All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
BARBARA DEMINGLet me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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.
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.
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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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There should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMING -
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING -
Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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.
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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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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.
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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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It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
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A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
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Vengeance is not the point: change is.
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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.
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Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMING






