Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

Elizabeth Janeway
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?

Elizabeth Janeway
Philosophically, incest asks a fundamental question of our shifting mores: not simply what is normal and what is deviant, but whether such a thing as deviance exists at all in human relationships if they seem satisfactory to those who share them.

Elizabeth Janeway
Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.

Elizabeth Janeway
The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.

Elizabeth Janeway
Reaction isn't action — that is, it isn't truly creative.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.

Elizabeth Janeway
Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.

Elizabeth Janeway
The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.

Elizabeth Janeway
A problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
If there's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come, there is nothing more ubiquitously pervasive than an idea whose time won't go.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
Those who despair of life are not long for it.

Elizabeth Janeway
We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.'

Elizabeth Janeway
Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
In this nadir of poetic repute, when the only verse that most people read from one year's end to the next is what appears on greetings cards, it is well for us to stop and consider our poets.... Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

Elizabeth Janeway
Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
'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.

Elizabeth Janeway