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

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.

— Barbara Deming

...the court, as now constituted, would be meaningless without the jail which gives it its power. But if there is anything I have learned by being in jail, it is that prisons are wrong, simply and unqualifiedly wrong.

— 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.

— Barbara Deming

Violence is already active here; it is built into the very structure OD the existing society. If we seek a world in which men do the least possible violence to each other (which is to state just the negative of it), then we are committed not simply to try to avoid violence ourselves, but to try to destroy patterns of violence which already exist.

— Barbara Deming

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.

— Barbara Deming