Lillian B. Rubin Quotes

#1. Whatever else we may say about sex, it is at least as much a social and psychological phenomenon as it is a biological one.

Lillian B. Rubin

#2. For those who have lived on the edge of poverty all their lives, the semblance of poverty affected by the affluent is both incomprehensible and insulting.

Lillian B. Rubin

#3. Children crawl before they walk, walk before they run
each generally a precondition for the other. And with each step they take toward more independence, more mastery of the environment, their mothers take a step away
each a small separation, a small distancing.

Lillian B. Rubin

#4. The ideal visions of one age eventually are seen as its excesses by the next.

Lillian B. Rubin

#5. From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.

Lillian B. Rubin

#6. Indeed, it is that ambiguity and ambivalence which often is so puzzling in women

Lillian B. Rubin

#7. In fact, the family as an institution is both oppressive and protective and, depending on the issue, is experienced sometimes one way, sometimes the other - often in some mix of the two - by most people who live in families.

Lillian B. Rubin

#8. Women find ways to give sense and meaning to daily life
ways to be useful in the community, to keep mind active and soul growingeven while they change diapers and cook vegetables.

Lillian B. Rubin

#9. Intimacy. We hunger for it, but we also fear it.

Lillian B. Rubin

#10. We are a society that values a man for what he does in the world, a woman for how she looks.

Lillian B. Rubin

#11. No revolution creates a wholly new universe. Rather, it reflects the history and culture that spawned it.

Lillian B. Rubin

#12. Society and personality live in a continuing reciprocal relation with each other. The search for personal change without efforts to change the institutions within which we live and grow will, therefore, be met with only limited reward.

Lillian B. Rubin

#13. Sexual freedom is about choice. It's the freedom to say no as well as yes.

Lillian B. Rubin

#14. The structure of the family is not born in nature but in human design. What we can do, we can also undo.

Lillian B. Rubin

#15. How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman
a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Lillian B. Rubin

#16. The depth of a friendship - how much it means to us ... depends, at least in part, upon how many parts of ourselves a friend sees, shares and validates.

Lillian B. Rubin

#17. Sometimes we choose a friend who mirrors our fantasies, dreams of a self we wish we could be.

Lillian B. Rubin