Elizabeth Janeway

Power is the ability not to have to please.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Poets are the leaven in the lump of civilization.

— Elizabeth Janeway

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Humor is an antidote to isolation.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Whatever class and race divergences exist, top cats are tom cats.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Can one consider controversy without falling into it?

— Elizabeth Janeway

We don't get offered crises, they arrive.

— Elizabeth Janeway

We put up with a lot to be saved from chaos. We always have.

— Elizabeth Janeway

As long as mixed grills and combination salads are popular, anthologies will undoubtedly continue in favor.

— Elizabeth Janeway

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

— Elizabeth Janeway

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

— Elizabeth Janeway

Love between women is seen as a paradigm of love between equals, and that is perhaps its greatest attraction.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Great writers leave us not just their works, but a way of looking at things.

— Elizabeth Janeway

a problem that presents itself as a dilemma carries an unfortunate prescription: to argue instead of act.

— Elizabeth Janeway

We are in a double bind. We are expected to feel inferior not only as women, but because we are old.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Few cultures have not produced the idea that in some past era the world ran better than it does now.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Today, what most people live in, or with, is the less-than-nuclear family. Working fathers are absent from home during most of the…

— Elizabeth Janeway

This is the power of the powerful to define, to structure, to say, 'This is the way the world works.' It's enormous…

— Elizabeth Janeway

If history is really relevant in today's world, the proposition doesn't command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but…

— Elizabeth Janeway

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the…

— Elizabeth Janeway

Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes…

— 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…

— Elizabeth Janeway

Man's world' and 'woman's place' have confronted each other since Scylla first faced Charybdis. ... if women have only a place, clearly…

— Elizabeth Janeway

we expect definitions to tell us not only what is, but what to do about it; to show us how the world…

— Elizabeth Janeway

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want…

— Elizabeth Janeway

The surprise of animals... in and out, cats and dogs and a milk goat and chickens and guinea hens, all taken for…

— Elizabeth Janeway

power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a…

— Elizabeth Janeway

I admire people who are suited to the contemplative life. They can sit inside themselves like honey in a jar and just…

— Elizabeth Janeway

television. It has changed the way that we perceive the world out there, and though we know that - have indeed been…

— Elizabeth Janeway

those who despair of life are not long for it.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Mistrust must be acted on, and effective action by the ruled is not solitary and singular, but joint and repeated.

— Elizabeth Janeway

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.

— Elizabeth Janeway

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Mythology is like gravity, inconvenient at times, but necessary for cohesion.

— 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

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…

— Elizabeth Janeway

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made…

— Elizabeth Janeway

The maxims for success laid out by the powerful are never much good as guides for those who aren't powerful.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Individual advances turn into social change when enough of them occur.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Art is a framework, a kind of living trellis, on which public dreaming can shape itself.

— Elizabeth Janeway