Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous power. Among the powers of the weak, I think the first one is the power not to believe the powerful.

Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

Creeds and causal systems have argued with each other for millennia, and even so we and our ancestors have managed to live in a world of differing opinions. Philosophical disputes don't often affect the price of fish or wine.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

We expect definitions to tell us not only what is, but what to do about it; to show us how the world fits together and how its different parts connect and work ... A label is the first step toward action.

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the day, the children are schooled outside it, and practically all women who work for money must go outside to earn their living.

The surprise of animals ... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.

By setting the passenger seat of my car far back, and opening the glove compartment, I nestle in a very large sheet of thick fiberboard. It's big enough to hold a table easel, my big palette and a water container. Winter is not going to lock me indoors!

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur ...

Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis ... if women have only a place, clearly the rest of the world must belong to someone else and, therefore, in default of God, to men.

The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.

It is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

We haven't come a long way, we've come a short way. If we hadn't come a short way, no one would be calling us baby.

Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

What society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

The idea of power as a possession, whose asset can be banked and drawn on when needed, comes easy to a society whose rules grow out of the methods of finance capitalism.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.