Audre Lorde - Change Quotes

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Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

Audre Lorde
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged... We have been taught to either ignore our differences or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression... Survival is learning to take our difference and make them strengths.

Audre Lorde
Some women wait for something
to change and nothing
does change
so they change
themselves.

Audre Lorde
I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.

Audre Lorde
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.

Audre Lorde
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

Audre Lorde
Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Audre Lorde
Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Audre Lorde
In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.

Audre Lorde
Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

Audre Lorde
If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.

Audre Lorde
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.

Audre Lorde