Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMINGOur own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMINGThe injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
BARBARA DEMINGLet me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
BARBARA DEMINGThere should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMINGGandhi 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 DEMINGAll prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
BARBARA DEMINGOf 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 DEMINGA great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMINGI 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 DEMINGSurely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMINGPeople 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.
BARBARA DEMINGThink first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
BARBARA DEMINGWhat 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 DEMINGPunishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMINGVengeance 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 DEMINGPeople who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING