Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

42 Sourced Quotes

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
Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
For what society requires from art... is that it function as an early warning system.

Elizabeth Janeway
I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

Elizabeth Janeway
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.

Elizabeth Janeway
If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

Elizabeth Janeway
Unless I am what I am and feel what I feel — as hard as I can and as honestly and truly as I can — then I am nothing. Let me feel guilty... don't try to educate me... don't protect me.

Elizabeth Janeway
Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.

Elizabeth Janeway