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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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Elizabeth Janeway
Age: 91 †
Born: 1913
Born: October 7
Died: 2005
Died: January 15
Author
Feminist
Historian
Literary Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Family
Program
Instincts
Learn
Behavior
Biology
Social
Question
Relations
Place
Takes
Raises
Human
Animal
Connections
Humans
Growing
Instinct
Matter
Within
Relation
Good
Rather
Animals
Uniquely

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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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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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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.
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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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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
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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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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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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.
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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.
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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!
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
Elizabeth Janeway
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
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.
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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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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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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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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