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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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Elizabeth Janeway
Age: 91 †
Born: 1913
Born: October 7
Died: 2005
Died: January 15
Author
Feminist
Historian
Literary Critic
Novelist
Brooklyn
New York
Think
Among
Thinking
Works
World
Powerful
Power
Define
Firsts
Powers
First
Enormous
Believe
Structure
Way
Weak

More quotes by 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.
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We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
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Humor is an antidote to isolation.
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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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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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Power is the ability not to have to please.
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Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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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 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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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.
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We don't get offered crises, they arrive.
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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.
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