107 quotes
Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Difference is that raw and powerful connection from which our personal power is forged.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We are jointly responsible for the care and raising of the young, since that they be raised is a function, ultimately, of the species.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
All our children are outriders for a queendom not yet assured.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Rape is not aggressive sexuality, it is sexualized aggression.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Narcissism comes not out of self-love but out of self-hatred.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The need for sharing deep feeling is a human need.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The knowledge of fear can help make us free.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Difference does not have to be threatening.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
One oppression does not justify another.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
The Uses of Anger : Women Responding to Racism (1981)
Pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Understanding is a hand-maiden which can only wait upon, or clarify, that knowledge, deeply born. The erotic is the nurturer or nursemaid of all our deepest knowledge.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Guilt and defensiveness are bricks in a wall against which we all flounder; they serve none of our futures.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Black feminists speak as women because we are women and do not need others to speak for us.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Pain is very visceral, particularly to the people who are hurting.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)