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 MorganIf I had to characterize one quality as the genius of feminist thought, culture, and action, it would be the connectivity.
Robin MorganFeminism is for all women and girls, not a privileged few or one ethnicity, religion, age, sexual preference, ability, region or hemisphere.
Robin MorganWhen solutions are offered us by the people who originally brought us the problem, we do well to be suspicious.
Robin MorganOppression is something that one group of people commits against another group specifically because of a threatening characteristic shared by the latter group.
Robin Morganraised' consciousness means lifelong bumping up against a continually receding ceiling. I mean, who ever 'graduates'?
Robin MorganIt 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 Morganin the United States ... given the cult of eternal youth, age is ignored unless it can be sentimentalized.
Robin MorganI 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 MorganI 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 MorganWhen 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 MorganLet'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 MorganIn 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 MorganI 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 MorganThe 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 MorganWhere else could one find such a perfect combination of American values -- racism, militarism, capitalism -- all packaged in one 'ideal' symbol, a woman.
Robin MorganThe 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 MorganThe "Otherizing" of women is the oldest oppression known to our species, and it's the model, the template, for all other oppressions.
Robin Morgan... 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 MorganKnowledge is power. Information is power. The secreting or hoarding of knowledge or information may be an act of tyranny camouflaged as humility.
Robin MorganYour life is the one place you have to spend yourself fully - wild - generous, drastic in an unrationed profligacy of self.
Robin MorganHate generalizes; love specifies. Or: The movements of hatred are toward generalization; love's movements are toward specification.
Robin MorganSilence is the first thing within the power of the enslaved to shatter. From that shattering, everything else spills forth.
Robin MorganChildren, 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 Morganevery 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 MorganAlthough 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 Morganguilt politics ... I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring.
Robin Morgan