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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
Believe
Structure
Way
Weak
Think
Among
Thinking
Works
World
Powerful
Power
Define
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Enormous
More quotes by Elizabeth Janeway
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
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
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
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
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
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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Powerful people get away with things. That's one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.
Elizabeth Janeway
Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.
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Power is the ability not to have to please.
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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
Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
Elizabeth Janeway
what society requires from art ... is that it function as an early warning system.
Elizabeth Janeway
Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
Elizabeth Janeway
If every nation gets the government it deserves, every generation writes the history which corresponds with its view of the world.
Elizabeth Janeway
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
We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.
Elizabeth Janeway
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
Humor is an antidote to isolation.
Elizabeth Janeway
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
Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
Elizabeth Janeway
