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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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Barbara Deming
Age: 67 †
Born: 1917
Born: July 23
Died: 1984
Died: August 2
Journalist
Writer
New York City
New York
Away
Ever
Human
Humans
Prisons
People
Existed
Date
Prison
Society

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There should be no censorship of mail.
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Surely all of us are nerved by one another, catch courage from one another.
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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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Nonviolent tactics can move into action on our behalf men not naturally inclined to act for us.
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We cannot live without our lives
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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?
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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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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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Our own pulse beats in every stranger's throat.
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People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations.
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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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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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To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek.
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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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Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.
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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.
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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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Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.
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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.
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