Barbara Deming Quotes

#1. Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

Barbara Deming

#2. A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.

Barbara Deming

#3. Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.

Barbara Deming

#4. 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

#5. 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.

Barbara Deming

#6. 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.

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

#8. 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

#9. The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one; the point is so to act that one can master them now.

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

#11. 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.

Barbara Deming

#12. Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.

Barbara Deming

#13. Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.

Barbara Deming

#14. 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

#15. 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.

Barbara Deming

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

#23. 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.

Barbara Deming

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

Barbara Deming

#25. 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.

Barbara Deming

#26. There should be no censorship of mail.

Barbara Deming

#27. 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

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

Barbara Deming

#29. 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

#30. We cannot live without our lives

Barbara Deming

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. 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