Barbara Deming Quotes

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.