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.
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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We cannot live without our lives
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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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Vengeance 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.
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Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
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Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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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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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING -
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
BARBARA DEMING -
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
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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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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.
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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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After the revolution, it might very well remain necessary to place people where they could not do harm to others. But the one under restraint should be cut off from the rest of society as little as possible.
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The point is to change one’s life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.
BARBARA DEMING






