59 Quotes by Barbara Deming

Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them.

All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away.

Nonviolent action does not have to get others to be nice. It can in effect force them to consult their consciences.

Our task, of course, is to transmute the anger that is affliction into the anger that is determination to bring about change. I think, in fact, that one could give that as a definition of revolution.

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.

The free man must be born before freedom can be won, and the brotherly man must be born before full brotherhood can be won. It will come into being only if we build it out of our very muscle and bone - by trying to act it out.

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.

The injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.

Think first of the action that is right to take, think later about coping with one's fears.