If you don’t define yourself for yourself then you will be crushed into other's fantasies of you and eaten alive
Interpretation
Self-definition is crucial to avoid being shaped by others' expectations.
This quote emphasizes the importance of self-identity and personal autonomy. Audre Lorde warns that if individuals do not take the initiative to define who they are, they risk being molded by the perceptions and fantasies of others, which can lead to a loss of individuality and a sense of being overwhelmed by external pressures.
In practice
This quote can inspire students in a graduation speech about embracing their own identities.
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.
If machines do everything well, including allocating capital and resources efficiently, can that be deflationary, can that eliminate poverty? I don't know. It's hard to be very optimistic if you look at how humans have behaved historically.
Cheap food is an illusion. There is no such thing as cheap food. The real cost of the food is paid somewhere. And if it isn't paid at the cash register, it's charged to the environment or to the public purse in the form of subsidies. And it's charged to your health.
In the Middle East, the conflict today is a matter of generations and not of cultures.
I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.
War has been avoided from a due sense of the miseries, and the demoralization it produces, and of the superior blessings of a state of peace and friendship with all mankind.
When I was younger, I could do something useful just by being free for half a day, but now I need five days to get the world I've left out of my head and ten days or a fortnight not talking to anyone to hold what I need to hold inside my head.
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