There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the interconnectedness of various social issues in our lives.
Audre Lorde highlights the complexity of human experiences, arguing that no struggle can be isolated from other aspects of identity and life. She suggests that our lives are multi-faceted, and issues such as race, gender, sexuality, and class are interrelated, requiring a holistic approach to understanding and addressing social justice.
In practice
In a speech advocating for women's rights, highlighting the importance of addressing race and class issues alongside gender.
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 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.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.
And though the newspapers called the shooting the Crime of the Century, Goldman knew it was only 1906 and there were ninety-four years to go.
Fool that I was, upon my eagle's wings I bore this wren, till I was tired with soaring, and now he mounts above me.
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.
It is only by enlarging the scope of one’s tastes and one’s fantasies, by sacrificing everything to pleasure, that the unfortunate individual called Man, thrown despite himself into this sad world, can succeed in gathering a few roses among life’s thorns
whose steps were a restless substitute for flight.
It was during the Reagan years that defiance of international law and the U.N. Charter became entirely open.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.