19 Quotes by Audre Lorde

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."

— Audre Lorde

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“You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.” — Audre Lorde

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"We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.”

— Audre Lorde

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"How are you practicing what you preach—whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?”

— Audre Lorde

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"Revolution is not a one-time event.”

— Audre Lorde

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"What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?”

— Audre Lorde

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"You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.”

— Audre Lorde

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"We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.”

— Audre Lorde

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"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

— Audre Lorde

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"Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness."

— Audre Lorde

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"There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives."

— Audre Lorde

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"Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it."

— Audre Lorde

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"Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

— Audre Lorde

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"Without community, there is no liberation."

— Audre Lorde

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"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me."

— Audre Lorde

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"I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain."

— Audre Lorde

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"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

— Audre Lorde

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"Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves."

— Audre Lorde

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"It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences."

— Audre Lorde

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