68 Quotes by 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.

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.

Powerful people get away with things. That’s one way to demonstrate their difference from the rest of us.

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.

If history is really relevant in today’s world, the proposition doesn’t command much respect. Perhaps the past is a different country, but if so no one much wants to travel there.

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.

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

We don’t get offered crises, they arrive.

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.