Barbara Deming Quotes - Page 2

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

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

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.

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

We cannot live without our lives

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

People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.

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.

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.

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.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

There should be no censorship of mail.

Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.

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

Nonviolent actions are by their nature androgynous. In them the two impulses that have long been treated as distinct, 'masculine' and 'feminine,' the impulse of self-assertion and the impulse of sympathy, are clearly joined; the very genius of nonviolence, in fact, is that it demonstrates them to be indivisible, and so restores human community.

there is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one's whole being in the determination: this must change.