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what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.

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
Early
System
Society
Art
Warning
Requires
Function

More quotes by Elizabeth Janeway

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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
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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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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Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
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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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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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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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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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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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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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Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
Elizabeth Janeway
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Power is the ability not to have to please.
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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a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
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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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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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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reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.
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