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 DemingWe 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 DemingNonviolent 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 Demingthere is clearly a kind of anger that is healthy. It is the concentration of one's whole being in the determination: this must change.
Barbara DemingThe injunction that we should love our neighbors as ourselves means to us equally that we should love ourselves as we love our neighbors.
Barbara DemingIt is not as mirrors reflect us but, rather, as our dreams do, that movies most truly reveal the times. If the dreams we have been dreaming provide a sad picture of us, it should be remembered that - like that first book of Dante's Comedy - they show forth only one region of the psyche. Through them we can read with a peculiar accuracy the fears and confusions that assail us - we can read, in caricature, the Hell in which we are bound. But we cannot read the best hopes of the time.
Barbara Deming