Sonia Johnson > Quotes

“I am a warrior in the time of women warriors; the longing for justice is the sword I carry.”
― Sonia Johnson

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson

“It's funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have "lifestyles.”
― Sonia Johnson

“Somehow I evolved into a person who ceased to ask permission.”
― Sonia Johnson

“As we become less afraid, we become more dangerous. Patriarchy can exist only so long as women are afraid.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson

“I look out upon the world men have made—their legislatures, courts, churches, schools, art, architecture, their politics, their economics—and I don't see anything I would have done as they have done it. Not one single thing. Their system does not reflect me at all, neither my mode of being in the world nor my world view; rather, it is inimical to all I love, all I desire, all I am. Its every aspect pains me to look at, to think about; it hurts me on all levels of my life; it is not my home.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“The instant enough of us detach from patriarchy and stop facilitating it, that is the instant tyranny will cease.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“Our internalized oppression has at its core the most unshakeable, almost unconscious conviction that we deserve our condition because we are inferior in every way; we cannot rule our own lives, we must depend on men for everything, and must therefore please them, because we have no personal power and are incompetent, unattractive, stupid. Name something positive and we're not it.

But men are. Every positive attribute finds its home in maleness. So we compete for the recognition and love of these demigods, their affirmation of the only affirmations we value. We try to win their acceptance and respect by repudiating that about ourselves—about women—which is different from them, emulating them, becoming more like them, always doing obeisance to their power structures, constantly reassuring them in hundreds of ways, large and small, that they needn't worry; we have no knowledge of the vast power within ourselves and no intention of finding out about it and using it.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“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.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“I know that Goddess ritual, insofar as it generates reverence for and celebrates that which is female, which is us, is fiercely empowering, and that her image in our minds—images of ourselves as deity—is necessary as a blueprint for a more authoritative mode of being in the world. The Goddess is a metaphor for our own and all women's creative, healing, transformative powers, a representation of our inner selves.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.”
― Sonia Johnson, Wildfire: Igniting the She/Volution

“The theme of the women's movement is female is beautiful, female is lovable; its agenda is for us to love ourselves as women, to deeply honor and respect ourselves and all women; not just women we agree with, not just other Lesbians or other heterosexual women, not just white or brown or black women, not just poor or working-class or middle-class or upper-class women, not just “well-adjusted” women, or healthy women, or women who smell good and brush their teeth regularly, or women who have accepted Jesus as their savior, or women who worship the Goddess. All women. And not just to like them, not just to find them non-disgusting, tolerable, okay. But to love them—completely, passionately, madly. To be full of compassion for one another, to be slow to take offense and quick to forgive. To conquer in ourselves the fierce pangs of competition and jealousy, and to rejoice genuinely in one another's success.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“It is unthinkable and monstrous in patriarchy for women to demonstrate that we care as much about justice and dignity, as much about freedom for ourselves and our sisters -- to the laying down of our lives, if necessary -- as men and women have always cared about justice and freedom for men. It is the ultimate anti-patriarchal act. It is heresy. It is revolution.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation

“We believe that patriarchal investment in hierarchy is so strong that even homosexuality, lesbianism, or any sexual response choice is not a threat to patriarchy as long as it supports hierarchy. Primary relationships do support hierarchy . It is well within the scope of current patriarchal boundaries for two lesbians to live as a suburban couple, have children, own a home, have two cars and be accepted at a progressive block party. Heterosexuality may be a prevalent example of male dominance, but it is not the prime mover of patriarchy - hierarchy is. If women choose to challenge patriarchy at its root, it will be in what we create with equality and not with whom we have sex.”
― Sonia Johnson, The Ship That Sailed into the Living Room: Sex and Intimacy Reconsidered

“As I looked about my self with new eyes, I lost all illusions about organized religion as a means to moral ends. I saw that all churches were the Mormon church—more or less spiritually squalid since they were made by men for men at the enormous expense of women. As Marlene Mountain puts it, “organized religion you bet/ organized against women.” I saw clearly that religion was the central pillar of patriarchy, the means through which male supremacy became and remains dogma, by which maleness is deified, and by which all that is female is subverted to the purposes of men.”
― Sonia Johnson, Going Out of Our Minds: The Metaphysics of Liberation