Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

38 Sourced Quotes

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The High Holy Days of my childhood... embodied the very essence of new beginnings; for autumn, not spring, was when everything was new: my clothes, my classroom, books, pencil box, teachers — and Jewish chronology, which decreed a fresh start, a clean slate, a chance to improve on the past.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity — a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Why hope to live a long life if we're only going to fill it with self-absorption, body maintenance and image repair? When we die, do we want people to exclaim 'She looked ten years younger,' or do we want them to say 'She lived a great life'?

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
Illness is friendship's proving ground, the uncharted territory where one's actions may be the least sure-footed but also the most indelible.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody — doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin
I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men--on an issue that affects millions of women.... I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin