Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

We need old friends to help us grow old and new friends to help us stay young.

If the family were a boat, it would be a canoe that makes no progress unless everyone paddles.

If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.

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.

Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?

A toy has no gender and no idea of whether a girl or boy is playing with it.

The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.

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?

A family stitched together with love seldom unravels.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

Friends seem to be like aspirin; we don't really know why they make a sick person feel better, but they do.

No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.

We mothers are learning to mark our mothering success by our daughters' lengthening flight.

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.

Apathy is the self-defense of the powerless.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

Illness is the proving ground of friendship.

The family endures because it offers the truth of mortality and immortality within the same group. The family endures because, better than the commune, kibbutz, or classroom, it seems to individualize and socialize its children, to make us feel at the same time unique and yet joined to all humanity, accepted as is and yet challenged to grow, loved unconditionally and yet propelled by greater expectations. Only in the family can so many extremes be reconciled and synthesized. Only in the family do we have a lifetime in which to do it.

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'?

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.

I feel about mothers the way I feel about dimples: because I do not have one myself, I notice everyone who does.

What I often say to people who are quick to say I’m not a feminist is if you think you’re not a feminist, give it all back.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.