Your Silence Will Not Protect You Quotes

“As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibility of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“There is a distinction I am beginning to make in my living between pain and suffering. Pain is an event, an experience that must be recognized, named and then used in some way in order for the experience to change, to be transformed into something else, strength or knowledge or action.

Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. When I live through pain without recognizing it self-consciously, I rob myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it. I condemn myself to reliving that pain over and over and over whenever something close triggers it. And that is suffering, a seemingly inescapable cycle.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematised oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the space of the dehumanised inferior.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“The fear of our desires keeps them suspect and indiscriminately powerful, for to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“In order to be whole, we must recognise the despair oppression plants within each of us — that thin persistent voice that says our efforts are useless, it will never change, so why bother, accept it. And we must fight that inserted piece of self-destruction that lives and flourishes like a poison inside of us, unexamined until it makes us turn upon ourselves in each other.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“Mainstream communication does not want women, particularly white women, responding to racism. It wants racism to be accepted as an immutable given in the fabric of existence, like evening time or the common cold.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“And poetry was the thing I had with words, that was so important... And on that hill, I had the first intimation that I could bring those two together. I didn't have to create the world I wrote about. I realised that words could tell.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“For it is not the anger of Black women which is dripping down over the globe like a diseased liquid. It is not my anger that launches rockets, spends over sixty thousand dollars a second on missiles and other agents of war and death, slaughters children in cities, stockpiles nerve gas and chemical bombs, sodomises our daughters and our earth.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“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”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems

“whatever was hidden out of fear could always be used either against the children or ourselves — one imperfect but useful argument for honesty. The knowledge of fear can help make us free.”
― Audre Lorde, Your Silence Will Not Protect You: Essays and Poems