Letty Cottin Pogrebin Quotes

Generations have been working in jobs they hate, just so they can buy what they don't really need.

O man you are busy working for the world, and the world is busy trying to turn you out.

The dog and the rabbit are telling us not to chase unattainable material goals.

My main thing is family first. This industry can get you so caught up that you're so busy chasing, wanting to be number one and wanting to be the richest that you lose sight of what life really is about.

My wife and son are my world and being there for them in every way possible is the only thing that matters to me... that and my work.

A society that refuses to strive for superfluities is likely to end up lacking in necessities.

the psychological attitudes which are indispensable in the American market place are disastrous to family life. Family life ... requires yieldingness, generosity, sympathy, altruism, tenderness-all the qualities, in fact, which lead straight to bankruptcy. ... the American family is tragically out of gear with the profit structure which has mushroomed up around it.

Don't forget until too late that the business of life is not business but living.

A human being has a natural desire to have more of a good thing than he needs.

By the time you establish your priorities, there really isn't any fun or need to interest yourself in what you're doing. And this I find disastrous.

What we want is not always what we need.

Life's not all about money.

Consider the "new" woman. She's trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She's supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home.

The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.

I am sure I'd have made a better all-around man if I hadn't lost so much time just making a living.

- I'm so busy doing what I must do that I don't have time for what I ought to do... and I never get a chance to do what I want to do! - Son, that's universal. The way to keep that recipe from killing you is occasionally to do what you want to do anyhow.

I'm learning that you have to make time for what's important. You have to fight to carve little pieces of happiness out of your life, or the everyday emergencies will eat up everything.

This is a very fickle business. It's really about how much you value the other things in your life. I still value too many other things more than I do fame.

There is a close relationship between a house full of possessions and a heart full of desires, between a cluttered closet and a crowded schedule, between having no place to put possessions and having no priorities for our life. These are precious clues. They remind us to slow down, to live in the present, to reduce the desires that drain our vitality, to clarify priorities so we can give our time and attention to what matters most. Tragically, in the press of modern life, we have managed to get backwards one of life's most vital truths: people are to be loved; things are to be used.

You have to have something in your life that's more important than the work. People don't really like to admit that. I think that you have to find something else. I don't know what it is. Is it yoga or God or politics? For me it's just family.

What people need and what they want may be very different.

I think women of a certain generation, mine in particular, feel like we can have it all because that's what we were fed. It's like, we reap the benefits of the feminist movement - they did all the legwork and now we're going to try to be parents and successful business people and great wives and good friends and take a cooking class and blah, blah, blah.

Is there something in trade that desiccates and flattens out, that turns men into dried leaves at the age of forty? Certainly there is. It is not due to trade but to intensity of self-seeking, combined with narrowness of occupation. Business has destroyed the very knowledge in us of all other natural forces except business.

What we really need is to realize how little we really need.

You really don't want a job. What you want is access to those things you'd like to have.