Carol Gilligan Quotations

Trust grows when babies and mothers establish that they can find each other again after the inevitable moments of losing touch. It is not the goodness of the mother or the relationship per se that is the basis for trust; it is the ability of mother and baby together to repair the breaks in their relationship that builds a safe house for love.

Everything about women is in perpetual crisis.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

Theory can blind observation.

Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.

At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered.

Pleasure is a sensation. It is written into our bodies; it is our experience of delight, of joy. ... Pleasure will become a marker, a compass pointing to emotional true north.

The blind willingness to sacrifice people to truth, however, has always been the danger of an ethics abstracted from life.

I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.