89 quotes
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)
It is not our differences which separate women, but our reluctance to recognize those differences and to deal effectively with the distortions which have resulted from the ignoring and misnaming of those differences.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I’m going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Guilt is only another form of objectification.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
Survival is the greatest gift of love.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other.
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)