56 Quotes by Sonia Johnson

I like to remind people what radical means – ‘at the root of things.’ It shouldn’t be considered a pejorative. There isn’t a great name out of history you can pick who wasn’t ’radical.

A friend said to me, ‘Be glad for your troubles – they strengthen you.’ Well, if that’s the truth, I’m going to be so strong they’ll have to beat me to death!

We survive day by day on this planet by adjusting down, adjusting down. Little by little, imperceptibly, we adjust to increasingly deadly conditions, and come to accept them as ‘natural’ or inevitable.

It’s only when we have nothing else to hold onto that we’re willing to try something very audacious and scary.

I’m one of the few people in this world who can do anything I choose. I can’t tell you how good I’m feeling.

I have decided not to be an accomplice in my own oppression any longer, never again to hand men weapons with which to kill me.

As we become less afraid, we become more dangerous. Patriarchy can exist only so long as women are afraid.

Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.

I also knew that, though I had never cared much what others thought of me and what I did, I would care even less in the future. And I realized that for the women’s movement to succeed, many women had to be similarly free, not just from the terror of breaking taboos, but from the garden-variety fear of social disapproval as well.