Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

Letty Cottin Pogrebin offers sharp reflections on love, work, and the contradictions of society.

17 quotes

Although Freud said happiness is composed of love and work, reality often forces us to choose love or work.

#1
America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.

#2
If family violence teaches children that might makes right at home, how will we hope to cure the futile impulse to solve worldly conflicts with force?

#3
Work-family conflicts-the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child-would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.

#4
The politics of the family are the politics of a nation. Just as the authoritarian family is the authoritarian state in microcosm, the democratic family is the best training ground for life in a democracy.

#5
Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.
Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.
Compared to other parents, remarried parents seem more desirous of their child's approval, more alert to the child's emotional state, and more sensitive in their parent-child relations. Perhaps this is the result of heightened empathy for the child's suffering, perhaps it is a guilt reaction; in either case, it gives the child a potent weapon, the power to disrupt the new household and come between parent and the new spouse.
No labourer in the world is expected to work for room, board, and love -except the housewife.
I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.
Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blueeyes or small feet.
If the family were a fruit, it would be an orange, a circle of sections, held together but separable - each segment distinct.
If the Richter scale could measure human calamities, the loss of a child would register a ten.
In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes… In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year… It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law… Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.
Friendships aren't perfect and yet they are very precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.
Friends can be said to "fall in like" with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love.
When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.