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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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Elizabeth Janeway
Age: 91 †
Born: 1913
Born: October 7
Died: 2005
Died: January 15
Author
Feminist
Historian
Literary Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Produced
Idea
Culture
Past
Doe
Ideas
Cultures
Better
Ran
World
Eras

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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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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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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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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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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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reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.
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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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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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
Elizabeth Janeway
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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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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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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.
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 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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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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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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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