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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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
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As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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those who despair of life are not long for it.
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I am not sure how many "sins" I would recognize in the world. Some would surely be defused by changed circumstances. But I can imagine none that is more irredeemably sinful than the betrayal, the exploitation, of the young by those who should care for them.
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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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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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Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
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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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Power is the ability not to have to please.
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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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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 every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.