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.
I think doctors care very deeply about their patients, but when they organize into the AMA, their responsibility is to the welfare of doctors, and quite often, these lobbying groups are the only ones that are heard in the state capitols and in the capitol of our country.
Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.
Thought is creating divisions out of itself and then saying that they are there naturally.
Men naturally rebel against the injustice of which they are victims. Thus, when plunder is organized by law for the profit of those who make the law, all the plundered classes try somehow to enter, by peaceful or revolutionary means, into the making of laws. According to their degree of enlightenment, these plundered classes may propose one of two entirely different purposes when they attempt to attain political power: Either they may wish to stop lawful plunder, or they may wish to share in it.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
But life at its best is a creative synthesis of opposites in fruitful harmony.
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