Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
Interpretation
The struggle against social injustices is as critical as the fight against disease.
In this quote, Audre Lorde expresses that the fight against racism, heterosexism, and apartheid is of equal importance to her as the battle against cancer. This highlights the urgency and significance of social justice issues, indicating that fighting for equality and liberation is a matter of life and death, much like dealing with a serious illness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of fighting for civil rights.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.
They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.
Our capacity for wholeheartednes s can never be greater than our willingness to be broken-hearted.
There was no way to laugh anymore, to love, to care, and there was a sense of guilt in having survived when others had been killed. I turned into a worse workaholic than I had already been by trying to work myself into the ground.
I wished I died in that attack with my cousin, with my south Vietnamese soldiers. I wish I died at that time so I won't suffer like that anymore... it was so hard for me to carry all that burden with that hatred, with that anger and bitterness.
The willow which bends to the tempest often escapes better than the oak which resists it.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.