Going Out of Our Minds Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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