Elizabeth Janeway Quotes
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
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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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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.
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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. 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.
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
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reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.
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Though we do not have many poets, we certainly have more than we deserve, for we deserve none at all. It is ourselves that we are hurting by our stupidity and ignorance of poetry.
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power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.
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Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
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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.
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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.
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those who despair of life are not long for it.
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Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.
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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.
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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.
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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.
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If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
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If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.
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Power is the ability not to have to please.
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How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.