Audre Lorde Quotes

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time. I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

As women, we know that we must always find ways to change the process because the present institutions want to hold on to power and keep the status quo.

When you're talking about an authority figure oppressing against people, it's the people that hold that authority figure up. If you want to get free of this bondage, then we need to think about ways to free ourselves rather than looking to the oppressors to free us.

I used to be a discipline problem, which caused me embarrassment until I realized that being a discipline problem in a racist society is sometimes an honor.

I just don't believe that when people are being unjustly oppressed that they should let someone else set rules for them by which they can come out from under that oppression.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Progress is always relative: to the oppressed, it can only be viewed as an all or nothing deal - if oppression continues, even in a modified form, then the system must still be attacked until that injustice is eradicated.

Don’t play with us. If you’re not going to give us justice, let us go so that we may help ourselves….We can’t want for benevolent white people to give us handouts.

Once you admit how bad it feels to live in a broken society, you can start to resist it, and imagine a better one.

We're not trying to take power away or rule anybody - we're just trying to get up from under the rulers.

America is a fundamentally good country. We have good people with good values who want to do the right thing. But the structures of power that exist are working to their own ends to extend their capability at the expense of the freedom of all publics.

Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

I don't think that people in power can be convinced by words or articles. They will never give it up by choice.

Feminism isn't simply about being a woman in a position of power. It's battling systemic inequities; it's a social justice movement that believes sexism, racism and classism exist and interconnect, and that they should be consistently challenged.

I like to be able to raise people's consciousness, yes. And to remind that those of us involved in the receiving end of the oppression, we have a duty.

The policemen or soldiers are only a gun in the establishments hand. They make the racist secure in his racism.

I feel that man-hating is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.

Some of those men in power, we just have to change their faces because we're not going to change their minds.

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.

Now that we are in power, we must ask ourselves, ‘how can we develop a truly just system rather than do to the elite what they have done to us?’

The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn't going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence.

Oppression costs the oppressor too much if the oppressed stand up and protest.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them