Elizabeth Janeway (October 7, 1913 – January 15, 2005) was an American author and critic.
Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis. . . . if women have only a place, clearly the rest of the world must belong to someone else and, therefore, in default of God, to men.
it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.
Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.
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.
Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.
a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.
If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.
Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.
The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.
those who despair of life are not long for it.
We older women who know we aren't heroines can offer our younger sisters, at the very least, an honest report of what we have learned and how we have grown.
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.
I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just be. It's wonderful to have someone like that around, you always feel you can count on them. You can go away and come back, you can change your mind and your hairdo and your politics, and when you get through doing all these upsetting things, you look around and there they are, just the way they were, just being.
Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.
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.
How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.
I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.
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.
television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been bombarded with analyses on the consequences for society, for the family, and for individual psychology - I don't believe that we have yet begun to appreciate the reach of its subliminal effects, of what we might call 'the slow viruses. ' They not only get into our ways of seeing, they pervade the ways in which we weave our perceptions together into patterns that support and explain our thinking and our doing and both direct and hinder various kinds of relationships.
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!