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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
Memorable
Please
Ability
Inspirational
Power

More quotes by Elizabeth Janeway

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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.
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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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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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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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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
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
Elizabeth Janeway
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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
Elizabeth Janeway
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
Elizabeth Janeway
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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.
Elizabeth Janeway
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
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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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
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
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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The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for granted, as if man was intended to live on terms of friendly intercourse with the rest of creation instead of huddling in isolation on the fourteenth floor of an apartment house in a city where animals occurred behind bars in the zoo.
Elizabeth Janeway
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reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.
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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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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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