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Midge Decter Quotes

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action.

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action.

Midge Decter
Inspiring, Powerful, Ideas

There comes a time to join the side you're on.

Midge Decter
Sides, There Comes A Time

It might sound a paradoxical thing to say --for surely never has a generation of children occupied more sheer hours of parental time -- but the truth is that we neglected you. We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms . . .

Midge Decter
Children, Sound, Generations
Midge Decter (1975). “Liberal parents, radical children”, Coward McCann

We allowed you a charade of trivial freedoms in order to avoid making those impositions on you that are in the end both the training ground and proving ground for true independence. We pronounced you strong when you were still weak in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling. Thus, it was no small anomaly of your growing up that while you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices by those into whose safe-keeping you had been given.

Midge Decter
Strong, Growing Up, Maturity
Midge Decter (1975). “Liberal parents, radical children”, Coward McCann

Ideas are powerful things, requiring not a studious contemplation but an action, even if it is only an inner action. Their acquisition obligates each man in some way to change his life, even if it is only his inner life. They demand to be stood for. They dictate where a man must concentrate his vision. They determine his moral and intellectual priorities. They provide him with allies and make him enemies. In short, ideas impose an interest in their ultimate fate which goes far beyond the realm of the merely reasonable.

Midge Decter
Powerful, Fate, Men

The hatred of the youth culture for adult society is not a disinterested judgement but a terror-ridden refusal to be hooked into the, if you will, ecological chain of breathing, growing, and dying. It is the demand, in other words, to remain children.

Midge Decter
Children, Breathing, Hatred

Women's Liberation calls it enslavement but the real truth about the sexual revolution is that it has made of sex an almost chaotically limitless and therefore unmanageable realm in the life of women.

Midge Decter
Sex, Real, Revolution
The New Chastity and Other Arguments Against Women's Liberation ch. 2 (1972)

We're not in the middle east to bring sweetness and light to the whole world. That's nonsense. We're in the middle east because we and our European friends and our European non-friends depend on something that comes from the middle east, namely oil.

Midge Decter
Light, Oil, Middle East
"Neo-Cons in Doubt about the War in Iraq". KCRW Podcast "To the Point" with Warren Olney, www.kcrw.com. May 21, 2004.

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