Audre Lorde Quotes

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone; who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.

Without community, there is no liberation.

We are all in the process of becoming.

The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.

You cannot use someone else's fire. You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

Black and Third World people are expected to educate white people as to our humanity. Women are expected to educate men. Lesbians and gay men are expected to educate the heterosexual world. The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Divide and conquer must become define and empower.

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

You are the one that you are looking for.

The speaking will get easier and easier. And you will find you have fallen in love with your own vision, which you may never have realized you had. And you will lose some friends and lovers, and realize you don't miss them. And new ones will find you and cherish you. And at last you'll know with surpassing certainty that only one thing is more frightening than speaking your truth. And that is not speaking.

If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it.

I am still learning - how to take joy in all the people I am, how to use all my selves in the service of what I believe, how to accept when I fail and rejoice when I succeed.

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don't want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.