Robin Morgan Quotes & Sayings

Guilt politics ... I regard as conveniently paralyzing, ripe for backlash defensiveness, counterproductive, and boring. — Robin Morgan

She touched her fingertip to his wet face and brought away a tear. Amazed, he did the same. He tasted this river his own eyes had rained.
"It tastes of salt!" he exclaimed. "It tastes like the sea!"
"Mine too!" she laughed through her own tears, and he touched and tasted hers as well. "It's as if humans kept a sign of the mother sea in ourselves, a secret token of grief or gladness. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

Being Cassandra is a principled choice when there is cause for alarm. — Robin Morgan

Friendship is mutual blackmail elevated to the level of love. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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 Morgan

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

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

We will grow old, and older,
One of us will die, and then the other.
The earth itself will be impaled
by sunspokes. It doesn't matter.
We have been imprinted on the protons
of energy herself, — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

Hate generalises, love specifies — Robin Morgan

Sexism is not the fault of women - kill your fathers, not your mothers. — Robin Morgan

Clarity of language is the first casualty of authoritarianism. — Robin Morgan

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

The egg cackles and lays the chicken. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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.' — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

Ordinary is a word that has no meaning. — 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 Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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

Raised' consciousness means lifelong bumping up against a continually receding ceiling. I mean, who ever 'graduates'? — Robin Morgan

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

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

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? — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

Life is a comedy far darker than drama. It just takes time to learn what to smile at. — Robin Morgan

Hate generalizes, love specifies. — Robin Morgan

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

Women are a colonized people. — Robin Morgan

Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan

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

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. — Robin Morgan

We are the women men warned us about. — Robin Morgan

We're not inherently anything but human. — Robin Morgan

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

Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible. — Robin Morgan

There's something contagious about demanding freedom. — Robin Morgan

In the United States ... given the cult of eternal youth, age is ignored unless it can be sentimentalized. — Robin Morgan

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

Censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books
with one hand. — Robin Morgan

Sisterhood is powerful. — Robin Morgan

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

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

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

I am an artist and a political being as well. — Robin Morgan

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. — Robin Morgan