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I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

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
Wells
Recognize
Oppressions
Come
Result
Blackness
Well
Fronts
Inseparable
Mean
Therefore
Struggles
Struggle
Primaries
Results
Primary
Black
Oppression
Power
Feminist

More quotes by Audre Lorde

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As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
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I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do.
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Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.
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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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Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive.
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The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.
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The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.
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Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
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Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.
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It is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others-for their use and to our detriment.
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The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.
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I soon discovered that if you keep your mouth shut, people are apt to believe you know everything, and they begin to feel freer and freer to tell you anything, anxious to show that they know something, too.
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We have too often been expected to speak all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our own.
Audre Lorde
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I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible.
Audre Lorde
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My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.
Audre Lorde
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There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Audre Lorde
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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.
Audre Lorde
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For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it.
Audre Lorde
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You are the one that you are looking for.
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When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde