Sonia Johnson Quotes

Sometimes I think we can tell how important it is to risk by how dangerous it is to do so.

Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

One of the basic tenets of radical feminism is that any woman in the world has more in common with any other woman regardless of class, race, age, ethnic group, nationality - than any woman has with any man.

We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.

In our home we grew up thinking we were Mormons first and human beings second.

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too.

The mid-life crisis hits men harder than women.

All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.

Women cannot serve two masters at once who are urgently beaming antithetical orders ... Either we believe in patriarchy the rule of men over women - or we believe in equality.

I liked the name of the amendment. I couldn't help feeling uneasy that the church was opposing something with a name as beautiful as the Equal Rights Amendment.

I don't have time' is the single most frequently given reason for living fractional, perpetually indentured lives, for not living fully or freely. Because time is life, when we say we don't have enough time, we are admitting that we don't have enough life.

The spirit of religious totalitarianism is abroad in the world; it is in the very air we breathe today in this land. Everywhere are those who claim to have a corner on righteousness, on direct access to God ... The bigots of the world are having a heyday.

A friend said to me, 'Be glad for your troubles - they strengthen you.' Well, if that's the truth, I'm going to be so strong they'll have to beat me to death!

Like the one-tenth of our brain that we currently use, I think now that most if not all of us have access to about one-tenth of our possible feelings.

I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.

I'm one of the few people in this world who can do anything I choose. I can't tell you how good I'm feeling.

The truth is that to displease men, to disobey them, is still deadly for women. But the truth also is that only when we stop obeying men do we truly begin to live.

As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.

We survive day by day on this planet by adjusting down, adjusting down. Little by little, imperceptibly, we adjust to increasingly deadly conditions, and come to accept them as 'natural' or inevitable.

It's funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have "lifestyles."

There has been only one war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men's all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.

I also knew that, though I had never cared much what others thought of me and what I did, I would care even less in the future. And I realized that for the women's movement to succeed, many women had to be similarly free, not just from the terror of breaking taboos, but from the garden-variety fear of social disapproval as well.

I like to remind people what radical means
'at the root of things.' It shouldn't be considered a pejorative. There isn't a great name out of history you can pick who wasn't 'radical.

I came from the most orthodox background you could ask for.

Somehow I evolved into a person who ceased to ask permission.

As we become less afraid, we become more dangerous. Patriarchy can exist only so long as women are afraid.

The church belongs to its hierarchy, which is men in power. Those outside the hierarchy, and especially women, are at best only renters and at worst squatters in religious territory.

How desperately we wish to maintain our trust in those we love! In the face of everything, we try to find reasons to trust. Because losing faith is worse than falling out of love.

In our patriarchal world, we are all taught - whether we like to think we are or not - that God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness ... that in order to propitiate God, women must propitiate men.

We don't need someone to show us the ropes. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Deep inside us we know the feelings we need to guide us. Our task is to learn to trust our inner knowing.

One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they would have to cease to do so.

What we have most to fear is failure of the heart.

nd that, in a thimble, is patriarchy. Mary Daly puts it more elegantly and succinctly: "As long as god is male," she says, "the male is God." Which is why changing our view of God has everything to do with changing the world.

I still feel Mormon. Those men in Salt Lake City can't decide who's Mormon and who isn't.