Riane Eisler Quotes

Having a great dad probably permitted me to pal around with guys in a way that some women don't.

I've got two older sisters, which I think was the best thing but also the worst thing. They dressed me up like a girl, but at the same time, I think they taught me a lot of what they experienced and what they lived through and passed that on to me as a young man and influenced how I approached not only women but people.

Well let me just say, for a man, a lot of how your approach and you're dealing with women comes from your mom.

Allowing an unimportant mistake to pass without a comment is a wonderful social grace ... Children who have the habit of constantly correcting should be stopped before they grow up to drive spouses and everyone else crazy by interrupting stories to say, 'No, dear -- it was Tuesday, not Wednesday.

We are in effect enculturating kids from the very beginning to see women and girls as not taking up half of the space.

Children learn about the nature of the world from their family. They learn about power and about justice, about peace and about compassion within the family. Whether we oppress or liberate our children in our relationships with them will determine whether they grow up to oppress and be oppressed or to liberate and be liberated.

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth.

He had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.

Lifestyles and sex roles are passed from parents to children as inexorably as blue eyes or small feet.

I think even though things are changing a bit, we still kind of tend to grow up with girls being like, 'Don't be too loud, don't be too rude, don't be too naughty,' or whatever, to act a certain way.

I am endlessly fascinated that playing football is considered a training ground for leadership, but raising children isn't.

For most progressives, what happens in families is a matter of "just" women's issues and children's issues. So progressive movements have focused primarily on dismantling the top of the dominator pyramid (politics and economics) and left its foundations (domination in family, gender, and other intimate relations) in place.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

I grew up in a remarkable home, the middle of seven children. My parents raised us well. They loved us well. We laughed hard growing up. But being the middle child, I couldn't figure out where I fit in the home, whether I was the youngest of the older three or the oldest of the younger three. When you don't know where you fit inside the home and you're young and you're desperate to fit in somewhere, I'd figured where I would fit outside the home. So I made some bad decisions about who I hung out with, I dropped out of high school, got kicked out of the house.

The knowledge that you were beaten and that this, as your parents tell you, was for your own good may well be retained (although not always), but the suffering caused by the way you were mistreated will remain unconscious and will later prevent you from empathizing with others. This is why battered children grow up to be mothers and fathers who beat their offspring

Like every child, I adored her. Until I formed a brain and got to know her.

Institutionalised in sports, the military, acculturated sexuality, the history and mythology of heroism, violence is taught to boys until they becomes its advocates.

I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys.

For that is what a child should be, and seldom is, the product of man and woman, of opposing natures, unified, however temporarily, by the amazing, circling, weaving dance of love and lust and God's involvement in it.

It's hard to come up with a 'quote' about myself. Perhaps I could say that most of my writing has been concerned with understanding between people. Whether of different races, or religions, or even in the same family I tried in my books... to deal with the subject of understanding the other fellow.

[Feminists think difference in men and women] is all social. It is all about social cliches and pressures, that if you just leave boys and girls alone they're gonna grow up and be identical. They're gonna be the same in the way they look at life, the way they find things interesting. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Everything in the world we want to do or get done, we must do with and through people. Every dollar we will ever earn must come from people. The person we love, and with whom we want to spend the rest of our life, is a human being with whom we must interact. Our children are individuals, each different from any other person who ever lived. And what affects them most is our attitude-the loving kindness they see and feel whenever we are around them. If you'll begin to develop and maintain an attitude that says yes to life and the world, you'll be astonished at the changes you'll see.

Women are not men's equals in anything except responsibility. We are not their inferiors, either, or even their superiors. We are quite simply different races.

When you grow up in that (multi-ethnic) environment, you see the world differently. Being a mixed-race child, I didn't always see colour in people, I really didn't. It was other people that made me see the colour all the time.

The mother must teach her son how to respect and follow the rules. She must teach him how to compete successfully with the other boys. And she must teach him how to find a woman to take care of him and finish the job she began of training him how to live in a family. But no matter how good a job a woman does in teaching a boy how to be a man, he knows that she is not the real thing, and so he tends to exaggerate the differences between men and women that she embodies.