Sonia Johnson Quotations

Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.

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.

What we have most to fear is failure of the heart.

The mid-life crisis hits men harder than women.

I liked the name of the amendment. I couldn't help feeling uneasy that the church was opposing something with a name as beautiful as the Equal Rights Amendment.

A friend said to me, 'Be glad for your troubles - they strengthen you.' Well, if that's the truth, I'm going to be so strong they'll have to beat me to death!

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.

It's only when we have nothing else to hold onto that we're willing to try something very audacious and scary.

I came from the most orthodox background you could ask for.

I still feel Mormon. Those men in Salt Lake City can't decide who's Mormon and who isn't.

In our home we grew up thinking we were Mormons first and human beings second.

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

In our patriarchal world, we are al1 taught -- whether we like to think we are or not -- that God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness . . . that in order to propitiate God, women must propitiate men.

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

Women cannot serve two masters at once who are urgently beaming antithetical orders.... Either we believe in patriarchy the rule of men over women - or we believe in equality.

What we resist persists.

So long as we think dugout canoes are the only possibility-all that is real or can be real-we will never see the ship, we will never feel the free wind blow.

Sometimes I think we can tell how important it is to risk by how dangerous it is to do so.

We survive day by day on this planet by adjusting down, adjusting down. Little by little, imperceptibly, we adjust to increasingly deadly conditions, and come to accept them as 'natural' or inevitable.

I don't have time' is the single most frequently given reason for living fractional, perpetually indentured lives, for not living fully or freely. Because time is life, when we say we don't have enough time, we are admitting that we don't have enough life.

Like the one-tenth of our brain that we currently use, I think now that most if not all of us have access to about one-tenth of our possible feelings.

As we do at such times I turned on my automatic pilot and went through the motions of normalcy on the outside, so that I could concentrate all my powers on surviving the near-mortal wound inside.

I like to remind people what radical means -- 'at the root of things.' It shouldn't be considered a pejorative. There isn't a great name out of history you can pick who wasn't 'radical.

people are strong despite suffering, not because of it.

The spirit of religious totalitarianism is abroad in the world; it is in the very air we breathe today in this land. Everywhere are those who claim to have a corner on righteousness, on direct access to God ... The bigots of the world are having a heyday.

The church belongs to its hierarchy, which is men in power. Those outside the hierarchy, and especially women, are at best only renters and at worst squatters in religious territory.

Some people always assume that if you mention a problem, you caused it.

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.

All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.

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

How desperately we wish to maintain our trust in those we love! In the face of everything, we try to find reasons to trust. Because losing faith is worse than falling out of love.

One of the basic tenets of radical feminism is that any woman in the world has more in common with any other woman regardless of class, race, age, ethnic group, nationality - than any woman has with any man.

In our patriarchal world, we are all taught - whether we like to think we are or not - that God, being male, values maleness much more than he values femaleness... that in order to propitiate God, women must propitiate men.

There has been only one war fought literally worldwide, affecting every living thing, and that has been men's all-out, non-stop, millennia-long war against women, a war that not only continues to this moment without the slightest abatement but intensifies hourly.

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

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

We don't need someone to show us the ropes. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Deep inside us we know the feelings we need to guide us. Our task is to learn to trust our inner knowing.

One of my favorite fantasies is that next Sunday not one single woman, in any country of the world, will go to church. If women simply stop giving our time and energy to the institutions that oppress, they would have to cease to do so.