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Power is the ability not to have to please.

Elizabeth Janeway

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Elizabeth Janeway
Age: 91 †
Born: 1913
Born: October 7
Died: 2005
Died: January 15
Author
Feminist
Historian
Literary Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Please
Ability
Inspirational
Power
Memorable

More quotes by Elizabeth Janeway

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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
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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
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Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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
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Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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