Barbara Deming Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Barbara Deming
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.

Barbara Deming
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
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
Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

Barbara Deming
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...

Barbara Deming
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.

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

Barbara Deming
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
Love is the falling rain,
Love is the following flood,
And love is the ark
With two of a kind aboard...

Barbara Deming
She had lived not merely her own life but, without restraint, as many other lives as possible, and those of her family, of course, had most tempted her.

Barbara Deming
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
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.

Barbara Deming
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.

Barbara Deming
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Barbara Deming
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
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?

Barbara Deming
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
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