Elizabeth Janeway Quotes
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Television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been bombarded with analyses on the consequences for society, for the family, and for individual psychology - I don't believe that we have yet begun to appreciate the reach of its subliminal effects, of what we might call 'the slow viruses.' They not only get into our ways of seeing, they pervade the ways in which we weave our perceptions together into patterns that support and explain our thinking and our doing and both direct and hinder various kinds of relationships.
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If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.
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I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.
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I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.
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Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
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The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.
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The common impulse is not to sustain a marriage by finding satisfaction elsewhere, but to end the marriage and set up a new one which will provide the comfort lacking in the first.
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We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.
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Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.
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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!
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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.
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Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.
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Can one consider controversy without falling into it?
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Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
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Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.
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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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The greatest barrier to women's advance in the public world of action has been their acquiescence in the idea that they don't belong out there.
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We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.
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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.
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Sex cannot be contained within a definition of physical pleasure, it cannot be understood as merely itself for it has stood for too long as a profound connection between human beings.
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Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?
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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.
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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.