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.
BARBARA DEMINGThink first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
More Barbara Deming Quotes
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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 -
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 DEMING -
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
BARBARA DEMING -
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?
BARBARA DEMING -
A great many of us must move from words to acts – from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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 -
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 -
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING -
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING -
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 -
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 -
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.
BARBARA DEMING -
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMING -
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
BARBARA DEMING