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We cannot live without our lives

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.
BARBARA DEMING

Experience Mean Men Name Simply
We 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 DEMING

Differences Justice Voice
There should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMING

Censorship Mail Regulation Strict
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING

Another Courage Nerve Surely
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
BARBARA DEMING

Attack Need People Rationalization
The 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 DEMING

Diversity Peace Real
It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
BARBARA DEMING

Able Antagonist Gains Real
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING

Need Speak Violent
A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING

Great Men Moving Obedience
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.
BARBARA DEMING

Choices Enemy Thinking
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
BARBARA DEMING

Our People Prison Society
Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
BARBARA DEMING

Happen Live Moment Place Time
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMING

Men Moving Tactic
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 DEMING

Anger Determination Thinking
The 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 DEMING

Being Brotherhood Free Men
The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
BARBARA DEMING

Injunction Mean Neighbor Ourselves

We cannot live without our lives

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We cannot live without our lives

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