Battling racism and battling heterosexism and battling apartheid share the same urgency inside me as battling cancer.
Interpretation
The struggle against social injustices is as critical as the fight against disease.
In this quote, Audre Lorde expresses that the fight against racism, heterosexism, and apartheid is of equal importance to her as the battle against cancer. This highlights the urgency and significance of social justice issues, indicating that fighting for equality and liberation is a matter of life and death, much like dealing with a serious illness.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech about the importance of fighting for civil rights.
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.
When danger is far off we may think of our weakness; when it is near we must not forget our strength.
Fidelity to the law of your own being is an act of high courage flung in the face of life.
Being defiant can be a good thing sometimes," Aunty Ifeoma said. "Defiance is like marijuana - it is not a bad thing when it is used right.
Great deeds are usually wrought at great risks.
The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
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