Riane Eisler famous quotes

04-06-2025

For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. .....The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.
-- Riane Eisler

#Children #Men #Law
The link between intimate violence in the home and the international violence of terrorism and war is as tightly bound together as the fingers of a clenched fist.
-- Riane Eisler

#War #Home #Together
For new ideas to be translated into new realities requires not only clarity of vision but also the opportunity to change old realities.
-- Riane Eisler

#Reality #Opportunity #Ideas
...that both Muslim fundamentalists and the Christian right are today focusing their attempts to regain control in a rapidly changing world on frantic efforts to maintain control over women, particularly over women's sexuality. Moreover, given their mythologies about "holy wars," it is also understandable that they should use "divinely approved" violence to do so...
-- Riane Eisler

#Christian #Women #War
This notion that man can, and should, have absolute dominion over the "chaotic" powers of nature and woman...is what ultimately lies behind man's famous "conquest of nature" - a conquest that is today puncturing holes in the earth's ozone layer, destroying our forests, polluting our air and water, and increasingly threatening the welfare, and even survival, of thousands of living species, including our own.
-- Riane Eisler

#Lying #Loss #Men
For as long as human beings are forced to live in a system that at every turn impedes the fulfillment of their basic human needs - not only for love but for creative and spiritual expression - they will try to compensate for this in other ways, including the compulsive acquisition of ever more material goods.
-- Riane Eisler

#Spiritual #Loss #Long
Rather than being any longer a threat to the established androcratic order, Christianity became what practically all this earth's religions, launched in the name of spiritual enlightenment and freedom, have also become: a powerful way of perpetuating that order.
-- Riane Eisler

#Spiritual #Powerful #Women
Schools in which students and teachers relate as partners-where Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication is part of every interaction are communities of learning, rather than top-down, impersonal factories. Young people begin to see school as a safe and exciting place of exploration where they can share feelings and ideas, and where each child is recognized, valued and nurtured.
-- Riane Eisler

#Teacher #Children #Communication
Nonviolent Communication is a powerful tool for peace and partnership. It shows us how to listen empathically and also communicate our authentic feelings and needs. Marshall Rosenberg has a genius for developing and teaching practical skills urgently needed for a less violent, more caring world.
-- Riane Eisler

#Powerful #Communication #Teaching
Marshall Rosenberg has a genius for developing and teaching practical skills urgently needed for a less violent, more caring world.
-- Riane Eisler

#Communication #Teaching #Caring
The only life many of the leaders of the anti-family planning movement seem to care about -- indeed obsess about -- is life before birth and after death.
-- Riane Eisler

#Leader #Movement #Care
Can we really expect adequate funding for programs to clean up our environment and care for people's basic needs as long as the socially essential work of caretaking and cleaning is relegated to women for little or no pay?
-- Riane Eisler

#Long #People #Essentials
there are only two basic ways of structuring the relations between the female and male halves of humanity. All societies are patterned on either a dominator model - in which human hierarchies are ultimately backed up by force or the threat of force - or a partnership model, with variations in between.
-- Riane Eisler

#Two #Humanity #Female
war and the 'war of the sexes' are neither divinely nor biologically ordained.
-- Riane Eisler

#Sex #War
Religion supports and perpetuates the social organization it reflects.
-- Riane Eisler

#Organization #Support #Social
to change our realities, we also have to change our myths. As history amply demonstrates, myths and realities go hand in hand.
-- Riane Eisler

#Reality #Hands #Myth
[On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art.
-- Riane Eisler

#Religious #Art #Love Life
At the core of every child is an intact human.
-- Riane Eisler

#Children #Humans
Obviously there is pain in childbirth. But giving birth is also a moment of awe and wonder, a moment when the true miracle of aliveness, and of a woman's amazing part in that miracle, is suddenly experienced in every cell of one's body. It is in that sense truly an altered state of consciousness.
-- Riane Eisler

#Pain #Cells #Giving
To heal ourselves we also have to heal society.
-- Riane Eisler

#Heal
When the status and power of women is greater so also is the nationâ€™s general quality of life; when they are lower, so is the quality of life for all.
-- Riane Eisler

#Quality #Quality Of Life
Women represent 70 percent of the 1.3 billion people in our world who live in absolute poverty. Consequently, as Joan Holmes, president of the Hunger Project, points out, any realistic efforts to change patterns of chronic hunger and poverty require changing traditions of discrimination against women.
-- Riane Eisler

#Our World #People #Effort
So many of the models of courage we've had, ones that are still taught to boys and girls, are about going out to slay the dragon, to kill. It's a courage that's born out of fear, anger, and hate. But there's this other kind of courage. It's the courage to risk your life, not in war, not in battle, not out of fear ... but out of love and a sense of injustice that has to be challenged. It takes far more courage to challenge unjust authority without violence than it takes to kill all the monsters in all the stories told to children about the meaning of bravery.
-- Riane Eisler

#Girl #Children #War
In sum, the struggle for our future is . . .Â the struggle between those who cling to patterns of domination and those working for a more equitable partnership world.
-- Riane Eisler

#Struggle #World #Patterns
...gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.
-- Riane Eisler

#Keys #People #Society

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