Barbara Deming
Barbara Deming
Barbara Demingwas an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change...
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.
mean neighbor should
The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
punishment spirit break
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.
fear thinking firsts
Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.
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.
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 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.
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.
people mind enemy
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.
moving men tactics
Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
self masculine-and-feminine two
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 ...
movie dream book
It is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do, that movies most truly reveal the times. If the dreams we have been dreaming provide a sad picture of us, it should be remembered that - like that first book of Dante's Comedy - they show forth only one region of the psyche. Through them we can read with a peculiar accuracy the fears and confusions that assail us - we can read, in caricature, the Hell in which we are bound. But we cannot read the best hopes of the time.