Elizabeth Janeway Quotes
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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.
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Can one consider controversy without falling into it?
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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.
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Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.
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Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.
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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.
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I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.
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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.
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As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.
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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.
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If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.
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I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be.
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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.
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
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I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.
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We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.
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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.
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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.
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Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
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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?
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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.
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Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
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television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been bombarded with analyses on the consequences for society, for the family, and for individual psychology - I don't believe that we have yet begun to appreciate the reach of its subliminal effects, of what we might call 'the slow viruses.' They not only get into our ways of seeing, they pervade the ways in which we weave our perceptions together into patterns that support and explain our thinking and our doing and both direct and hinder various kinds of relationships.
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it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.
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Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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