Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMINGNonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMINGThink first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
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 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 DEMINGWe 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 DEMINGThe 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 DEMINGOur own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMINGIt is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
BARBARA DEMINGThe 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 DEMINGA great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMINGPunishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMINGAll prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
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 DEMINGPeople who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMINGOur 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 DEMINGWe 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