Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don't really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do.

Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes ... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year ... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law ... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.

Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon
the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.

A family stitched together with love seldom unravels.

The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.

Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men
on an issue that affects millions of women ... I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill.

If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

What I often say to people who are quick to say I'm not a feminist is if you think you're not a feminist, give it all back.

We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.

The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families.

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?

The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.

People tend to be exquisitely precise when describing pain. We don't just say it hurts, we say it throbs or aches; it's a burning, wrenching, gnawing sensation; it's sharp or dull; it chafes; it stings. But where pain specifies, joy generalizes. It was great! we say. Terrific! Beautiful! Fantastic!

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

When the president of the United States flicks the switch to light up the Christmas tree on the White House lawn, that house ceases to be an American symbol; it becomes a Christian symbol.

It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me.

Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

Work-family conflicts
the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child
would not be forced upon women with suchsanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.