Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Letty Cottin Pogrebin quote about:
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“We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“When a family is free of abuse and oppression, it can be the place where we share our deepest secrets and stand the most exposed, a place where we learn to feel distinct without being better, - and sacrifice for others without losing ourselves.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“I find it profoundly symbolic that I am appearing before a committee of fifteen men who will report to a legislative body of one hundred men because of a decision handed down by a court comprised of nine men--on an issue that affects millions of women.... I have the feeling that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be struggling for this legislation. If men could get pregnant, maternity benefits would be as sacrosanct as the G.I. Bill.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“The risk for a woman who considers her helpless children her "job" is that the children's growth toward self-sufficiency may be experienced as a refutation of the mother's indispensability, and she may unconsciously sabotage their growth as a result.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Work-family conflicts--the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child--would not be forced upon women with suchsanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon--the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“The ultra-right would have us believe that families are in trouble because of humanism, feminism, secular education, or sexual liberation, but the consensus of Americans is that what tears families apart is unemployment, inflation, and financial worries.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“The all American work ethic, destructive enough by itself, also packs a gender double standard that strip-mines the natural resources of both parents. It has taught us that as their earnings and success increase, men become "more manly," while women become "less feminine." This perverse cultural dynamic gives fathers an incentive to stay away from their families and kill themselves at work, while coercing mothers to limit their career commitment, which in turn limits their wages and shortchanges their families.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Much is made of the accelerating brutality of young people's crimes, but rarely does our concern for dangerous children translateinto concern for children in danger. We fail to make the connection between the use of force on children themselves, and violent antisocial behavior, or the connection between watching father batter mother and the child deducing a link between violence and masculinity.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Why hope to live a long life if we're only going to fill it with self-absorption, body maintenance and image repair? When we die, do we want people to exclaim 'She looked ten years younger,' or do we want them to say 'She lived a great life'?”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“It's smart to be friends with one's sex partner but dumb to have sex with one's friends.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Mothers remember a child's first words, and quote them in tones usually reserved for Byron.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“To me, a person's identity is composed of both an 'I' and a 'we.' The 'I' finds itself in love, work, and pleasure, but it also locates itself within some meaningful group identity - a tribe, a community, a 'we.' America is too big and bland a tribe for most of us.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“It angers me that sick people have to wait for everything and everybody - doctors, nurses, callbacks, lab results, prescriptions, medications, technicians, treatment rooms. If illness is the embodiment of powerlessness, which, believe me, is true, then waiting is its temporal incarnation.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“I want to visit Memory Lane, I don't want to live there.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Other than life experience, nothing left a deeper imprint on my formative self than the movies.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Illness is the proving ground of friendship.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“We can remind the world that all the dead on both sides have not settled our differences, so now it is time for the living to renounce violence as a means of solving this conflict.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin -
“Like many another romance, the romance of the family turns sour when the money runs out. If we really cared about families, we would not let 'born again' patriarchs send up moral abstractions as a smokescreen for the scandal of American family economics.”
-- Letty Cottin Pogrebin
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