107 quotes
The power to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending rather than the beginning of something new.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history.
The truest direction comes from inside.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The erotic cannot be felt secondhand.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Your silence will not protect you.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one’s own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
What understanding begins to do is to make knowledge available for use, and that’s the urgency, that’s the push, that’s the drive.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Anger is loaded with information and energy.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
As outsiders, we need each other for support and connection and all the other necessities of living on the borders. But in order to come together we must recognize each other.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We do not have to live the same mistakes over again if we can look at them, learn from them, and build upon them.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Change is the immediate responsibility of each of us, wherever and however we are standing, in whatever arena we choose.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Name-calling is always easiest when it is removed, academic.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and cruelty.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is any one of you.