110+ Audre Lorde Quotes On Power, Community And Education

Audre Lorde was an American poet, essayist, and civil rights activist. She was a self-described "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet" who dedicated her life to confronting and addressing the injustices of racism, sexism, and homophobia. Her work has been widely praised for its passionate and outspoken style, and her influence on the LGBTQ+ movement has been profound. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Audre Lorde on power, love, community.

Top 10 Audre Lorde Quotes

1. If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.
2. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
3. Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.
4. Divide and conquer must become define and empower.
5. Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.
6. Oppression is as American as apple pie.
7. Unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless.
8. The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations that we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us.
9. We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.
10. I have come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.

Audre Lorde Short Quotes

• Revolution is not a one time event.
• You are the one that you are looking for.
• Even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded...
• We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.
• I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.
• Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.
• The transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation .
• Self-care is not about self-indulgence , it is about self-preservati on.
• Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one's own actions or lack of action.
• Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

Audre Lorde Quotes About Power

I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable. — Audre Lorde

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

We are powerful because we have survived — Audre Lorde

The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival. — Audre Lorde

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. It is this real connection, which is so feared by a patriarchal world. — Audre Lorde

The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. . . . — Audre Lorde

Women are powerful and dangerous. — Audre Lorde

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 restriction of externally imposed definition. — Audre Lorde

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is discounted as a luxury, then we give up the core -- the fountain -- of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds. (From "Poetry is Not a Luxury") — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Love

Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. — Audre Lorde

I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. — Audre Lorde

When I speak of the erotic, then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives. — Audre Lorde

Raising Black children-female and male-in the mouth of a racist, sexist, suicidal dragon is perilous and chancy. If they cannot love and resist at the same time, they will probably not survive. — Audre Lorde

We're supposed to see "universal" love as heterosexual. What I insist upon in my work is that there is no such thing as universal love in literature. — Audre Lorde

Every woman I have ever loved has left her print upon me, where I loved some invaluable piece of myself apart from me-so different that I had to stretch and grow in order to recognize her. And in that growing, we came to separation, that place where work begins. — Audre Lorde

We cannot settle for the pretenses of connection, or for the parodies of self-love. — Audre Lorde

If you do not learn to hate you will never be lonely enough to love easily nor will you always be brave, although it does not grow any easier. Do not pretend to convenient beliefs, even when they are righteous; you will never be able to defend your city while shouting. — Audre Lorde

In the recognition of loving lies the answer to despair. — Audre Lorde

‎Once we recognize what it is we are feeling, once we recognize we can feel deeply, love deeply, can feel joy, then we will demand that all parts of our lives produce that kind of joy. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Community

Without community, there is no liberation. — Audre Lorde

Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist. — Audre Lorde

stoicism and silence does not serve us nor our communities, only the forces of things as they are. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Writing

I realize that if I wait until I am no longer afraid to act, write, speak, be, I'll be sending messages on a Ouija board, cryptic complaints from the other side — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak, but the truth of that language by which we speak it. — Audre Lorde

All writers have periods when they stop writing, when they cannot write, and this is always painful and terrible because writing is like breathing. — Audre Lorde

I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Powerful

pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. — Audre Lorde

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. — Audre Lorde

My anger has meant pain to me but it has also meant survival, and before I give it up I'm going to be sure that there is something at least as powerful to replace it on the road to clarity. — Audre Lorde

What is there possibly left for us to be afraid of, after we have dealt face to face with death and not embraced it? Once I accept the existence of dying as a life process, who can ever have power over me again? — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Inspiring

...and that visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength. — Audre Lorde

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

Art is not living. It is the use of living. — Audre Lorde

Life is very short and what we have to do must be done in the now. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Afraid

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing. — Audre Lorde

Afraid is a country with no exit visas. — Audre Lorde

and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed but when we are silent we are still afraid So it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive — Audre Lorde

The more I use my strength in the service of my vision the less I am afraid. — Audre Lorde

What I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid? — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Difference

The failure of academic feminists to recognize difference as a crucial strength is a failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower. — Audre Lorde

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. — Audre Lorde

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic. — Audre Lorde

The difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children. — Audre Lorde

As we come to know, accept, and explore our feelings, they will become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas-the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. — Audre Lorde

... it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. — Audre Lorde

Those of us forged in the crucibles of difference know that survival is not an academic skill. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

When you are a member of an out-group, and you challenge others with whom you share this outsider position to examine some aspect of their lives that distorts differences between you, then there can be a great deal of pain. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Vision

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before. — Audre Lorde

I am not just a lesbian. I am not just a poet. I am not just a mother. Honor the complexity of your vision and yourselves. — Audre Lorde

Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge. They are chaotic, sometimes painful, sometimes contradictory, but they come from deep within us. And we must key into those feelings... This is how new visions begin. — Audre Lorde

Who I am is what fulfills me and fulfills the vision I have of the world. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Quotes About Define

If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive — Audre Lorde

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

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

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 own oppression as women. — Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde Famous Quotes And Sayings

Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You [white women] fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you; we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs on the reasons they are dying. — Audre Lorde

My silences had not protected me. 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. — Audre Lorde

It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other 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 the strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. — Audre Lorde

To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival. — Audre Lorde

For we have built into all of us, old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression and these must be altered at the same time that we alter the living condition which are the result of those structures. For the master's tool will never dismantle the master's house. — Audre Lorde

It is not the destiny of Black America to repeat white America's mistakes. But we will, if we mistake the trappings of success in a sick society for the signs of a meaningful life. — Audre Lorde

I have a duty to speak the truth as I see it and share not just my triumphs, not just the things that felt good, but the pain, the intense, often unmitigated pain. It is important to share how I know survival is survival and not just a walk throught the rain. — Audre Lorde

...my experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me. — Audre Lorde

What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heel print upon another woman's face? — Audre Lorde

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. — Audre Lorde

When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry. — Audre Lorde

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. — Audre Lorde

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, beautiful and tough as chestnut stanchions against our nightmare of weakness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling — Audre Lorde

From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. — Audre Lorde

June Jordan once said something which is just wonderful. I'm paraphrasing her-that her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well o.k. that is the function of us all, as creative artists, to make the truth, as we see it irresistible. — Audre Lorde

Every Black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and unexpressed angers. — Audre Lorde

For within livin 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

I believe one of the hardest things you can do is conquer your fears, but if you have a goal, then it's your job to open up and let it be real no matter how scary it seems. — Audre Lorde

I am a Black Lesbian Feminist Warrior Poet Mother, stronger for all my identities, and I am indivisible. — Audre Lorde

The oppression of women knows no ethnic nor racial boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries. — Audre Lorde

Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer. — Audre Lorde

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

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change. — Audre Lorde

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. — Audre Lorde

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. — Audre Lorde

. . . it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are-until the poem-nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. — Audre Lorde

When I hear the deepest truths I speak coming out of my mouth sounding like my mother's, even remembering how I fought against her, I have to reassess both our relationship as well as the sources of my knowing. — Audre Lorde

Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips — Audre Lorde

I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. — Audre Lorde

And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe. — Audre Lorde

Silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness. — Audre Lorde

I am on the cusp of change and the curve is shifting fast. — Audre Lorde

Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it. ... pain will always either change or stop. Always. ... The confidence that it will change is what makes bearing it possible. So pain is fluid. It is only when you conceive of it as something static that it is unbearable. — Audre Lorde

I remember how being young and black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell. — Audre Lorde

I stand here as a black lesbian feminist, having been invited to comment within the only panel at this conference where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented. What this says about the vision of this conference is sad, in a country where racism, sexism and homophobia are inseparable. . . . — Audre Lorde

I have suckled the wolf's lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter. — Audre Lorde

We must constantly encourage ourselves and each other to attempt the heretical actions that our dreams imply and so many of our old ideas disparage. — Audre Lorde

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

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives. — Audre Lorde

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself. — Audre Lorde

To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society — Audre Lorde

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt. — Audre Lorde

Perhaps...I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am Black, because I am a lesbian, because I am myself--a Black woman warrior poet doing my work--come to ask you, are you doing yours? — Audre Lorde

If our history has taught us anything, it is that action for change directed against the external conditions of our oppressions is not enough. — Audre Lorde

Poetry is not a luxury. — Audre Lorde

The absence of any consideration of lesbian consciousness or the consciousness of third world women leaves a serious gap within this conference. . . . — Audre Lorde

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . . — Audre Lorde

Next time, ask: What's the worst that will happen? Then push yourself a little further than you dare. — Audre Lorde

Every woman I have ever known has made a lasting impression on my soul. — Audre Lorde

But in a crunch, when all our asses are in the sling, it looks like it is easier to deal with the samenesses. When we deal with sameness only, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we wipe each other out - Black men and women can wipe each other out - far more effectively than outsiders do. — Audre Lorde

How a diamond comes into a knot of flame How a sound comes into a word, coloured By who pays what for speaking. Some words are open. Love is a word another kind of open — As a diamond comes into a knot of flame I am black because I come from the earth's inside. Take my word for jewel in your open light. — Audre Lorde

Pain is an event ... Suffering, on the other hand, is the nightmare reliving of unscrutinized and unmetabolized pain. — Audre Lorde

We must wake up knowing we have work to do and go to bed knowing we've done it. — Audre Lorde

If I cannot air this pain and alter it, I will surely die of it. That's the beginning of social protest. — Audre Lorde

Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action. — Audre Lorde

What I leave behind has a life of its own. — Audre Lorde

Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression. — Audre Lorde

We are all in the process of becoming. — Audre Lorde

Life Lessons by Audre Lorde

1. Audre Lorde taught us to embrace our differences and celebrate our unique identities. She encouraged us to use our voice to speak out against injustice and to stand up for what we believe in. Lastly, she reminded us that we are powerful when we come together and use our collective strength to create positive change.