Elizabeth Janeway Quotes & Sayings

#1. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#3. 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

#4. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#6. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#8. 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

#9. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#11. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#13. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

Elizabeth Janeway

#19. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#22. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#24. What society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

Elizabeth Janeway

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#28. We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

Elizabeth Janeway

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

Elizabeth Janeway

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#31. 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

#32. Reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

Elizabeth Janeway

#33. 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

#34. Can one consider controversy without falling into it?

Elizabeth Janeway

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#36. By setting the passenger seat of my car far back, and opening the glove compartment, I nestle in a very large sheet of thick fiberboard. It's big enough to hold a table easel, my big palette and a water container. Winter is not going to lock me indoors!

Elizabeth Janeway

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Elizabeth Janeway

#40. 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