Audre Lorde was a writer, librarian, civil rights activist, and feminist who dedicated her life to fighting against the injustices of homophobia, classism, sexism, and racism. A self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” she was known for the bold and powerful language she used throughout her many poems, essays, and speeches as well as her two memoirs.
Today, Lorde’s legacy lives on in both her written work and the lives of those impacted by her activism. From Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, this collection of quotes honors her ongoing influence and reflects her wisdom.
Quotes on Community
Lorde was keen on embracing people’s differences in order to build stronger coalitions and communities. The following quotes capture her perspective on creating bonds and open a window into how we can better work together towards our goals.
1. “In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.” —Audre Lorde
2. “When a people share a common oppression, certain kinds of skills and joint defenses are developed. And if you survive you survive, because those skills and defenses have worked. When you come into conflict over other existing differences, there is a vulnerability to each other which is desperate and very deep.” —Audre Lorde
3. “You do not have to be me in order for us to fight alongside each other. I do not have to be you to recognize that our wars are the same.” —Audre Lorde
4. “What we must do is commit ourselves to some future that can include each other and to work toward that future with the particular strengths of our individual identities. And in order for us to do this, we must allow each other our differences at the same time as we recognize our sameness.” —Audre Lorde
5. “When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I'm not excluding you from the joining—I'm broadening the joining.” —Audre Lorde
6. “Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all.” —Audre Lorde
7. “Unity implies the coming together of elements which are, to begin with, varied and diverse in their particular natures.” —Audre Lorde
8. “We must recognize and nurture the creative parts of each other without always understanding what will be created.” —Audre Lorde
9. “Our persistence in examining the tensions within diversity encourages growth toward our common goal. So often we either ignore the past or romanticize it, render the reason for unity useless or mythic. We forget that the necessary ingredient needed to make the past work for the future is our energy in the present, metabolizing one into the other. Continuity does not happen automatically, nor is it a passive process.” —Audre Lorde
10. “Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.” —Audre Lorde
11. “We share a common interest, survival, and it cannot be pursued in isolation from others simply because their differences make us uncomfortable.” —Audre Lorde
12. “Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it—hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else.” —Audre Lorde
13. “Within each one of us there is some piece of humanness that knows we are not being served by the machine which orchestrates crisis after crisis and is grinding all our futures into dust.” —Audre Lorde
14. “Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.” —Audre Lorde
Quotes on Integrity
Staying true to yourself and your values is something Lorde highly encouraged others to do throughout her life. Learn about her own lived experience and how she shared these moments to invigorate others to keep their integrity in the face of adversity.
15. “I find I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.” —Audre Lorde
16. “My fullest concentration of energy is available to me only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restrictions of externally imposed definition. Only then can I bring myself and my energies as a whole to the service of those struggles which I embrace as part of my living.” —Audre Lorde
17. “I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts.” —Audre Lorde
18. “For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others—for their use and to our detriment.” —Audre Lorde
19. “We do not have to romanticize our past in order to be aware of how it seeds our present.” —Audre Lorde
20. "We do not have to suffer the waste of an amnesia that robs us of the lessons of the past rather than permit us to read them with pride as well as deep understanding.” —Audre Lorde
21. “Survival is the greatest gift of love.” —Audre Lorde
22. “What gets me about the United States is that it pretends to be honest and therefore has so little room to move toward hope.” —Audre Lorde
23. “My daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, ‘Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside.’” —Audre Lorde
24. “How are you practicing what you preach—whatever you preach, and who is exactly listening?” —Audre Lorde
25. “This is how I learned that if I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.” —Audre Lorde
26. “There are so many ways in which I’m vulnerable… I’m not going to be more
vulnerable by putting weapons of silence in my enemies’ hands.” —Audre Lorde
Quotes on Activism and Feminism
Lorde was very outspoken about her beliefs on liberating those who were oppressed and dismantling systems that kept many disadvantaged and disenfranchised. Here are some of her powerful words on activism and feminism.
27. “Your silence will not protect you.” —Audre Lorde
28. “Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.” —Audre Lorde
29. “Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.” —Audre Lorde
30. “The oppressors maintain their position and evade their responsibility for their own actions. There is a constant drain of energy which might be better used in redefining ourselves and devising realistic scenarios for altering the present and constructing the future.” —Audre Lorde
31. “How much of this truth can I bear to see and still live unblinded? How much of this pain can I use?” —Audre Lorde
32. “For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered.” —Audre Lorde
33. “For within living structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.” —Audre Lorde
34. “Women of today are still being called upon to stretch across the gap of male ignorance and to educate men as to our existence and our needs. This is an old and primary tool of all oppressors to keep the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns. Now we hear that is the task of women of Color to educate white women—in the face of tremendous resistance—as to our existence, our differences, our relative roles in our joint survival. This is a diversion of energies and a tragic repetition of racist patriarchal thought.” —Audre Lorde
35. “Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.” —Audre Lorde
36. “As white women ignore their built-in privilege of whiteness and define woman in terms of their own experience alone, then women of Color become ‘other,’ the outsider whose experience and tradition is too ‘alien’ to comprehend.” —Audre Lorde
37. “The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors' tactics, the oppressors' relationships.” —Audre Lorde
38. “Revolution is not a one-time event.” —Audre Lorde
39. “If I participate, knowingly or otherwise, in my sister's oppression and she calls me on it, to answer her anger with my own only blankets the substance of our exchange with reaction. It wastes energy.” —Audre Lorde
40. “What better way is there to police the streets of a minority community than to turn one generation against the other?” —Audre Lorde
41. “The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us—the poet—whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.” —Audre Lorde
42. “In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.” —Audre Lorde
43. “Oppressed peoples are always being asked to stretch a little more, to bridge the gap between blindness and humanity.” —Audre Lorde
44. “However, experience has taught us that action in the now is also necessary, always.” —Audre Lorde
45. “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.” —Audre Lorde
Quotes on Self-Confidence
Empowering others to believe in themselves is one of Lorde’s many notable legacies. Turn to her words whenever you need a jolt of self-confidence and confirmation of your worth.
46. “You become strong by doing the things you need to be strong for.” —Audre Lorde
47. “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired.” —Audre Lorde
48. “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” —Audre Lorde
49. “We know what it is to be lied to, and we know how important it is not lie to ourselves. We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it all about—survival and growth” —Audre Lorde
50. “We are powerful because we have survived, and that is what it is all about—survival and growth.” —Audre Lorde
51. "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. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations and recognitions from within ourselves—along with the renewed courage to try them out.” —Audre Lorde
52. “Within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not—I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.” —Audre Lorde
53. “The fear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women.” —Audre Lorde
54. “We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.” —Audre Lorde
55. “On the cause of silence, each of us draws the face of their own fear—fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgement, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live.” —Audre Lorde
