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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.

Barbara Deming

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

Happen Live Moment Place Time
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
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
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
BARBARA DEMING

Break Punishment Spirit
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
BARBARA DEMING

Men Moving Tactic
To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
BARBARA DEMING

Need Speak Violent
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
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 DEMING

Cutting Harm Little People Revolution
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
We cannot live without our lives
BARBARA DEMING

Happen Life Live Our Surrounding
Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
BARBARA DEMING

Action Doe Nice
Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.
BARBARA DEMING

Fear First Thinking
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
There should be no censorship of mail.
BARBARA DEMING

Censorship Mail Regulation Strict
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
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
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.
BARBARA DEMING

Change Mind People
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

Always Deep Judgment Obiient Sense
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
BARBARA DEMING

Another Courage Nerve Surely
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
Our own pulse beats in every stranger’s throat.
BARBARA DEMING

Pulse Spiritual Stranger
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.
BARBARA DEMING

Change Long Running
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.
BARBARA DEMING

Doubt Jail Trying
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
BARBARA DEMING

Change Point Vengeanc
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

Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.

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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one’s fears.

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