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 DEMINGThe injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
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We cannot live without our lives
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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.
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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
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Vengeance is not the point: change is.
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Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
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To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
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There should be no censorship of mail.
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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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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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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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All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
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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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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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A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING