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"To resort to power one need not be violent, and to speak to conscience one need not be meek. The most effective action both resorts to power and engages conscience."
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"A stone thrown up into the air is bound to fall down, and absolute power is like a huge stone thrown up into the air."
"Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught."
"It is easy, out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, 'I couldn't help it; the way was set.' But think of the glory of the choice!"
"Power is only vouchsafed to the man who dares to stoop and pick it up."
"Whoever has experienced the power and the unrestrained ability to humiliate another human being automatically loses his own sensations. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man or woman to the level of a beast. Blood and power intoxicate ... the return of the human dignity, repentance and regeneration becomes almost impossible."
"But I believe we have a higher level of mentality within us, but we have to use the power in the right way."
"It is an incapacitating emotion one feels upon hearing the whispered words "I still love you" after deeply hurting that soul. Forgiveness isn't weakness.It is power."
Explore more quotes by Barbara Deming
"Vengeance is not the point; change is. But the trouble is that in most people's minds the thought of victory and the thought of punishing the enemy coincide."
"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."
"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."
"People who attack others need rationalizations for doing so. We undermine those rationalizations."
"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."
"All prisons that have existed in our society to date put people away as no human being should ever be put away."
"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."
"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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