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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?

Barbara Deming

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Barbara Deming
Age: 67 †
Born: 1917
Born: July 23
Died: 1984
Died: August 2
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Without
Battle
Resides
Strength
Gandhi
Taught
Resort
Wife
Resorts
Peace
Declared
Power
Effectiveness
Women
Battles
Better
Physical
Unwittingly

More quotes by Barbara Deming

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People may find it more comfortable to listen to us if we equivocate, but in the long run only words that discomfort them are going to change our situation.
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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.
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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.
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Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
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There should be no censorship of mail.
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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.
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All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.
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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.
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We cannot live without our lives
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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.
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The point is to change one's life. The point is not to give some vent to the emotions that have been destroying one the point is so to act that one can master them now.
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Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
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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.
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A great many of us must move from words to acts - from words of dissent to acts of disobedience.
Barbara Deming
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Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
Barbara Deming
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Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
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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.
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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.
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The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.
Barbara Deming