Elizabeth Janeway Quotes

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.

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.

Power is the ability not to have to please.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

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.

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

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

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

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

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

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

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

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

Can one consider controversy without falling into it?

those who despair of life are not long for it.

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.

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

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

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

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

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.

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.

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

Power is the ability not to have to please