Barbara Deming

Barbara Deming
Barbara Demingwas an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change...
real able gains
It is one thing to be able to state the price the antagonist paid, another to be able to count you own real gains.
peace nice doe
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. Nonviolent actions does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences. Nor does it have to petition those in power to do something about a situation. It can face the authorities with a new fact and say: Accept this new situation which we have created.
men brotherhood trying
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.
voice differences justice
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.
peace lying thinking
What is the revolution that we need? We need to dissolve the lie that some people have a right to think of other people as their property. And we need at last to form a circle that includes us all, in which all of us are seen as equal... We do not belong to the other, but our lives are linked; we belong in a circle of others.
people needs
People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
fear thinking firsts
Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.
people our-society prison
All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
believe names acting
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.
nice doe action
Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
heart pressure argument
This is the heart of my argument: We can put more pressure on the antagonist for whom we show human concern.
judgment should judgment-of-others
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.
mail censorship should
There should be no censorship of mail.