When I Dare to Be Powerful Quotes

“Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hat-red, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it - hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“We have been raised to fear the yes, within ourselves, our deepest cravings. But, once recognised, those which do not enhance our future lose their power, and can be altered. 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, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“I’ve been told that crying makes me seem soft and therefore of little consequence. As if our softness has to be the price we pay out for power, rather than simply, the one that’s paid most easily and most often.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“It is not difference, which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“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.
For when we have been socialised to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful

“Tell them about how you're never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there's always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don't speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.”
― Audre Lorde, When I Dare to Be Powerful