“We cannot live without our lives”

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.

We 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.

Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.

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.

This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

Gandhi 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?

A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.

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

Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Vengeance is not the point: change is.

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.

No one betrays us as much in our lives as we betray ourselves.

If you’d bothered to ask me, Clark, if you’d bothered to consult me just once about this so-called fun outing of ours.

We must have Christian ethics for our children, good and strong, but we must make them attractive, too, and it can be done.

All mankind rules its women, and we rule all mankind, but our women rule us.

Ours is the century of enforced travel of disappearances.

Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness

We are all drifting reefwards now, and faith is our only anchor.

The danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.