Robin Morgan Quotations

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

Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't accept rides from strange men - and remember that all men are strange as hell.

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.

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.

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

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.

We are the women men warned us about.

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

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.

Should we tolerate debate within feminism's ranks? Undebatable! But it's not so simple: women are socialised to avoid conflict; when we do differ, especially on politics and in public, it's still tediously labelled a 'catfight.'

I am an artist and a political being as well.

Women born and raised on this fragile planet have more uniting us than dividing us - and it's the job of feminists to help us realise that.

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

I feel like I've gotten away from God-knows-what, ... but I feel safe now. I like the treatment I'm getting here. The treatment I'm getting here is much better than I was getting when I was there from the police officers and stuff.

I'm scared. If it happened this time, it can happen again. That's my child in there.

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.

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

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

Ordinary is a word that has no meaning.

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

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

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Women are a colonized people.

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.

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

The egg cackles and lays the chicken.

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

... 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.

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

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

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

There's something contagious about demanding freedom.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Crisis can be an addiction as powerful as any other ...

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?

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.

Sisterhood is powerful.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.