Robin Morgan famous quotes

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.
-- Robin Morgan

#Inspirational #Peace #Impossible

When solutions are offered us by the people who originally brought us the problem, we do well to be suspicious.
-- Robin Morgan

#People #Problem #Wells

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully--wild, generous, drastic--in an unrationed profligacy of self ... And in that split second when you understand that you finally are about to die-to uncreate the world no time to do it over no more chances--that instant when you realize your conscious existence is truly flaring nova, won't you want to have used up all-all-the splendor that you are?
-- Robin Morgan

#Self #World #Splits

I feel that 'man-hating' is an honourable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.
-- Robin Morgan

#Hate #Men #Class

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human.
-- Robin Morgan

#Justice #Peaceful #Passive

Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.
-- Robin Morgan

#Friendship #Powerful #Levels

We are the women men warned us about.
-- Robin Morgan

#Inspiring #Men

Where else could one find such a perfect combination of American values -- racism, militarism, capitalism -- all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.
-- Robin Morgan

#Perfect #Racism #Combination

Sisterhood is powerful.
-- Robin Morgan

#Sister #Powerful #Sisterhood

Knowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
-- Robin Morgan

#Peace #Knowledge #Humility

... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or bookscontaining lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.
-- Robin Morgan

#Book #Self #Tears

A genuine Left doesn't consider anyone's suffering irrelevant or titillating; nor does it function as a microcosm of capitalist economy, with men competing for power and status at the top, and women doing all the work at the bottom.... Goodbye to all that.
-- Robin Morgan

#Goodbye #Men #Suffering

Women are a colonized people.
-- Robin Morgan

#People #Male Dominance #Oppression

White males are the most responsible for the destruction of human life and environment on the planet today.
-- Robin Morgan

#White #Environmental #Today

... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books--with one hand.
-- Robin Morgan

#Dirty #Book #Hands

The subtlest and most vicious aspect of women's oppression is that we have been conditioned to believe we are not oppressed, blinded so as not to see our own condition.
-- Robin Morgan

#Believe #Oppression #Vicious

The "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.
-- Robin Morgan

#Oppression #Sexism #Models

Feminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere.
-- Robin Morgan

#Girl #Ethnicity #Feminism

It isn't until you begin to fight in your own cause that you (a) become really committed to winning, and (b) become a genuine ally of other people struggling for their freedom.
-- Robin Morgan

#Struggle #Fighting #Winning

Any single path truly taken leads to all the others. What matters is choosing a starting place - where to stand and begin spinning outward. Even then, you will find that outward and inward become the same direction. The center of the wheel is everywhere.
-- Robin Morgan

#Taken #What Matters #Inward

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism.
-- Robin Morgan

#Firsts #Clarity #Language

Metaphor is the energy charge that leaps between images, revealing their connections.
-- Robin Morgan

#Energy #Connections #Metaphor

Silence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.
-- Robin Morgan

#Silence #Firsts #Oppression

Ordinary is a word that has no meaning.
-- Robin Morgan

#Ordinary #Ordinariness

For a poet, making poems is a way of viewing the world, being in the world, breathing.
-- Robin Morgan

#Breathing #Poetry #World

Politics becomes a part of your life once you realize it has been all along.
-- Robin Morgan

#Politics #Realizing

guilt politics ... I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring.
-- Robin Morgan

#Guilt #Politics #Boring

In the long run, Women's Liberation will of course free men-but in the short run it's going to COST men a lot of privilege, which no one gives up willingly or easily.
-- Robin Morgan

#Running #Giving Up #Men

being Cassandra is a principled choice when there is cause for alarm.
-- Robin Morgan

#Choices #Causes #Alarms

We can't destroy the inequities between men and women until we destroy marriage.
-- Robin Morgan

#Men #Feminist #Men And Women

... life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at.
-- Robin Morgan

#Drama #Comedy #Life Is

The present always masquerades as a beginning; maybe we couldn't endure it if we realized at the time that it was a peak, or even an ending.
-- Robin Morgan

#Masquerade #Endure

every actor knows that tragedy, being linear and inevitable, is taxing - but comedy, which depends on the element of surprise, is the hardest act of all.
-- Robin Morgan

#Tragedy #Actors #Elements

Your life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully - wild - generous, drastic in an unrationed profligacy of self...
-- Robin Morgan

#Life #Self #Drastic

If I had to characterize one quality as the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the connectivity.
-- Robin Morgan

#Feminist #Quality #Genius

Don't accept rides from strange men, and remember that all men are strange.
-- Robin Morgan

#Men #Strange #Remember

What would we do without irony? Check out your own daily reliance on it, the foul-weather friend who's there for you when nothing else is.
-- Robin Morgan

#Weather #Irony #Foul

Hate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.
-- Robin Morgan

#Hate #Hatred #Movement

Carry yourself as one who will change the world, because you will.
-- Robin Morgan

#World #Changing The World

The Roman Catholic church... carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion
-- Robin Morgan

#Abortion #Catholic #Church

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.
-- Robin Morgan

#Freedom #Contagious

Oppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.
-- Robin Morgan

#People #Groups #Oppression

I haven't the faintest notion what possible revolutionary role white hetero- sexual men could fulfill, since they are the very embodiment of reactionary- vested-interest-power. But then, I have great difficulty examining what men in general could possibly do about all this. In addition to doing the shitwork that women have been doing for generations, possibly not exist? No, I really don't mean that. Yes, I really do.
-- Robin Morgan

#Mean #Men #White

My white skin disgusts me. My passport disgusts me. They are the marks of an insufferable privilege bought at the price of others' agony. If I could peel myself inside out I would be glad. If I could become part of the oppressed I would be free.
-- Robin Morgan

#Agony #White #Skins

Sexism is not the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers
-- Robin Morgan

#Mother #Father #Faults

An indigenous feminism has been present in every culture in the world and in every period of history since the suppression of women began.
-- Robin Morgan

#Feminism #World #Culture

in the United States ... given the cult of eternal youth, age is ignored unless it can be sentimentalized.
-- Robin Morgan

#Age #United States #Youth

All art is the tension, expressed between the uncontainable and its one perfect inevitable form.
-- Robin Morgan

#Art #Perfect #Form

I still gasp at the revealing lingo for weapons: erector launchers, thrust ratios; my teeth grind reflexively when Dubya sputters Eye-Rack and Eye-Ran have 'nookyular capabacity.
-- Robin Morgan

#Eye #Weapons #Ratios

No matter how expected, death is always the ultimate surprise.
-- Robin Morgan

#Death #Matter #Surprise

When table utensils were invented in the 1100s, the Catholic Church condemned them as obscene and heretical, claiming, 'God gave us fingers with which to eat.' And we're supposed to get politically discouraged? Oh please. We're being opposed by people who denounced the fork.
-- Robin Morgan

#People #Catholic #Religion

Crisis can be an addiction as powerful as any other ...
-- Robin Morgan

#Powerful #Addiction #Crisis

Legitimate revolution must be led by, made by those who have been most oppressed: black, brown, yellow, red, and white women-with men relating to that the best they can.
-- Robin Morgan

#Men #Yellow #White

Children, together with women, constitute 90 percent of all refugee populations on the planet as well as the vast majority of those living in absolute poverty: the 'feminization of poverty' means that children are poor, too, since most parenting is done by mothers.
-- Robin Morgan

#Mother #Children #Mean

people are capable of profound metamorphosis, though unfortunately they rarely avail themselves of this genius, force of habit being an even greater enemy of change than cowardice.
-- Robin Morgan

#Change #Profound #People

Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.
-- Robin Morgan

#Fear #Hate #Evil

Listen - life is really going on, right now, around us. Do you see it? Sometimes I lose it but if I sit still and listen, it comes back, and then I think, How funny, this is what being alive is.
-- Robin Morgan

#Inspirational Life #Thinking #Alive

The Confucian concept and Chinese ideograms for 'woman' and for 'slave' are the same.
-- Robin Morgan

#Women #Chinese #Slave

The egg cackles and lays the chicken.
-- Robin Morgan

#Women #Eggs #Chickens

The women's movement is a non-hierarchical one. It does things collectively and experimentally.
-- Robin Morgan

#Doe #Movement

I do believe deeply that all human beings, male and female, are sexual beings, most likely bisexual beings channeled this way and that by cultures terrified of boundary crossings without passports stamped gay or straight.
-- Robin Morgan

#Believe #Gay #Bisexual

Let's put one lie to rest for all time: the lie that men are oppressed, too, by sexism-the lie that there can be such a thing as men's liberation groups.
-- Robin Morgan

#Lying #Men #Groups

raised' consciousness means lifelong bumping up against a continually receding ceiling. I mean, who ever 'graduates'?
-- Robin Morgan

#Mean #Ceilings #Graduates