Quote by Audre Lorde: “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.”

You cannot fundamentally challenge an unjust system by using its own methods and logic — those tools were built to maintain the system, not destroy it. Real change requires new frameworks, new language, and new ways of thinking that the system never anticipated.

Lorde delivered this in a paper at a feminist conference in New York University in 1979, challenging predominantly white feminist organisations to confront their exclusion of women of colour. It was later published in Sister Outsider in 1984, and has become one of the most quoted ideas in feminist and political theory.

American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist who described herself as 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet.' Her essays and poetry addressed the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality with fierce clarity, and her 1984 collection Sister Outsider remains essential reading.