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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

Audre Lorde

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Audre Lorde
Age: 58 †
Born: 1934
Born: February 18
Died: 1992
Died: November 17
Essayist
Feminist
Librarian
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Audre Geraldine Lorde
Tools
Masters
Literature
Peace
House
Action
Dismantle
Power
Inequality
Never
Master

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I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast.
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Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
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Tomorrow belongs to those of us who conceive of it as belonging to everyone who lend the best of ourselves to it, and with joy.
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The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.
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If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough.
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Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideasl The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves--along with the renewed courage to try them out.
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Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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Only by learning to live in harmony with your contradictions can you keep it all afloat.
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I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.
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It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.
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Say what you have to say now! Don't wait until you're sending blips from the other side.
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Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge.
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The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
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In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair.
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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
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So it is better to speak, remembering we were never meant to survive.
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To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society
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The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The black goddess within each of us - the poet - whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.
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Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me.
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I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.
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