Barbara Deming
Barbara Deming
Barbara Demingwas an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change...
peace effectiveness wife
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?
peace real diversity
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.
determination opportunity thinking
Balance and control come from healthy anger. This is just as aggressive as the unhealthy kind. But it is based on a belief and hope for change in social roles and institutions. Healthy anger demands change and creates the confrontations needed for change to occur. It also gives the other an opportunity to help make that change. “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.
christian jesus love-you
Manliness has been defined as assertion of the self. Womanliness has been defined as the nurturing of selves other than our own - even if we quite lose our own in the process. (Women are supposed to find in this loss their true fulfillment.) But every individual person is born both to assert herself or himself and to act out a sympathy for others trying to find themselves - in Christian terms, meant to love one's self as one loves others ... Jesus never taught that we should split up that commandment - assigning 'love yourself' to men, 'love others' to women. But society has tried to.
vengeance
Vengeance is not the point: change is.
our-lives
We cannot live without our lives
mail censorship should
There should be no censorship of mail.
jail doubt trying
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.
mean men names
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.
cutting people littles
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.
moving great-men obedience
A great many of us must move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
thinking choices enemy
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.
spiritual pulse stranger
Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.
strength movement liberation
A liberation movement that is nonviolent sets the oppressor free as well as the oppressed.