Audre Lorde > Quotes

“This hatred and our anger are very different. Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change. But our time is getting shorter. We have been raised to view any difference other than sex as a reason for destruction, and for Black women and white women to face each other's angers without denial or immobility or silence or guilt is in itself a heretical and generative idea. It implies peers meeting upon a common basis to examine difference, and to alter those distortions which history has created around our difference. For it is those distortions which separate us. And we must ask ourselves: Who profits from all this?”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“We can learn to mother ourselves.”
― Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

“For it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advances can be made. The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between unequals have not served us as a people, nor as individuals.”
― Audre Lorde, Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving

“Audre Lorde: 'If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
― Audre Lorde

“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house.”
― Audre Lorde