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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.

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
Choice
Abandon
Hold
Oppression
Vision
Enemies
Adopts
Enemy
Concept
Abandons
Choices
Familiar
Naming
Think
Concepts
Oppressive
Thinking
Tradition
Nonviolent
Behavior
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More quotes by Barbara Deming

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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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To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
Barbara Deming
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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.
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.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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We cannot live without our lives
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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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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Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
Barbara Deming
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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
Barbara Deming
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There should be no censorship of mail.
Barbara Deming
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Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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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.
Barbara Deming
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Let me be really here, here in this place and this time where I am.
Barbara Deming