Quotes by Barbara Deming

“A great many of us [must] move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.”

“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 . . .”

“The longer we listen to one another - with real attention - the more commonality we will find in all our lives. That is, if we are careful to exchange with one another life stories and not simply opinions.”

“Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most peoples minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.”

“I learned always to trust my own deep sense of what I should do, and not just obediently trust the judgment of others – even others better than I am.”

“Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with ones fears.”

“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.”

“To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience.”

“Make it impossible for [the authority] to operate within the system as usual . . . making it impossible for him simply to strike back without thought and with all his strength.”

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

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure od the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

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

...the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.

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.

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.

Vengeance is not the point change is. But the trouble is that in most peoples minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide.