Quotes from Sonia Johnson

What we resist persists.

The mid-life crisis hits men harder than women.

Language, as symbol, determines much of the nature and quality of our experience.

We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.

Freedom is necessary for honesty, honesty for integrity, integrity for power, power for creativity, and all of them for intimacy.

Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

Obviously, the anti-ERA people are tickled about my ordeal because it proves that the ERA breaks up families. When they point out that feminism is a dangerous thing, I just say marriage is pretty precarious too.

I'm one of the few people in this world who can do anything I choose. I can't tell you how good I'm feeling.

The guiding principle of my life, 'the means are the ends,' has taught me that our participation in a corrupt system facilitates it and corrupts and therefore defeats us.

I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.

We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.

It's funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have lifestyles.

Somehow I evolved into a person who ceased to ask permission.

As we become less afraid, we become more dangerous. Patriarchy can exist only so long as women are afraid.

I have decided not to be an accomplice in my own oppression any longer, never again to hand men weapons with which to kill me.

Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.

One of the cruelest crimes of patriarchy has been to teach us to project our thoughts into a future that will never come (getting together our vitae and our five-year-plans) or focusing us back into a past that is only memories of a present, keeping us unaware of the locus of our power in the present moment and effectively imprisoning us in time.

I also knew that, though I had never cared much what others thought of me and what I did, I would care even less in the future. And I realized that for the women's movement to succeed, many women had to be similarly free, not just from the terror of breaking taboos, but from the garden-variety fear of social disapproval as well.

nd that, in a thimble, is patriarchy. Mary Daly puts it more elegantly and succinctly: "As long as god is male," she says, "the male is God." Which is why changing our view of God has everything to do with changing the world.

The truth is that to displease men, to disobey them, is still deadly for women. But the truth also is that only when we stop obeying men do we truly begin to live.

When [women] understand that the penalties are the same whether we disobey a little or disobey completely, but that the rewards come only when we disobey completely, then we are ready to be free.

One of the most insistent messages from my inner voice in the last few years reaffirms the feminist revelation that among the myriad hoaxes of men, the biggest and most basic is what we are socialized to perceive as real.

The instant enough of us detach from patriarchy and stop facilitating it, that is the instant tyranny will cease.

Once we understand that patriarchy is totally dependent upon our mistrusting and thwarting and hurting one another, and that for this reason we have been deliberately, thoroughly, and fiercely indoctrinated from birth to hate and to hurt women, surely we can forgive one another and learn to resist the most central and deadly of all patriarchal mandates.