Audre Lorde Quotes

I am a Black feminist. I have a responsibility to speak the truth as I see it.

Your silence will not protect you.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation.

Revolution is not a one-time event.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me.

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

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

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

I am who I am doing what I came to do. Be it a voice of innuendo out of stone.

If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.

I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they were so terrified because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.

And yes we must raise our voices. I, for one, am trying with all my being to lift my voice.

I am a Black feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions comes as a result of my blackness as well as my woman-ness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

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

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.

I am my best work – a series of road maps, reports, recipes, doodles, and prayers from the front lines.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself.

Your silence will not protect you.

Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas. The head will save us. The brain alone will set us free. But there are no new ideas waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human.

I can’t really define it in sexual terms alone although our sexuality is so energizing why not enjoy it too?

Our speaking out will irritate some people, get us called bitchy or hypersensitive and disrupt some dinner parties. And then our speaking out will permit other women to speak, until laws are changed and lives are saved and the world is altered forever.

There are so many ways to be beautiful.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.

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

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

Without community, there is no liberation.

I write as a Black woman, as a lesbian, as a poet, as a warrior, as a feminist, as a Black feminist.

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

My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences.

I was going to die, sooner or later, whether or not I had even spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

In our work and in our living, we must recognize that difference is a reason for celebration and growth, rather than a reason for destruction.

The erotic has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confused by its opposite—fear.

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

I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.

Survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.

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.

I change myself, I change the world.

If we are not actively, visibly, moving in that direction right now, then we are passive bystanders, neutral witnesses who have no right to complain later.

Art is not a luxury. Art is a vital necessity of our existence.