Top 30 Sonia Johnson Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

2. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

3. “The mid-life crisis hits men harder than women.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

5. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

6. “Women have to risk civil disobedience for their rights.”

— Sonia Johnson

7. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

8. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

10. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

12. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

13. “All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

15. “I have decided not to be an accomplice in my own oppression any longer, never again to hand men weapons with which to kill me.”

— Sonia Johnson

16. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

17. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

18. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

19. “It’s funny how heterosexuals have lives and the rest of us have “lifestyles.””

— Sonia Johnson

20. “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

21. “As we become less afraid, we become more dangerous. Patriarchy can exist only so long as women are afraid.”

— Sonia Johnson

22. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

25. “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!”

— Sonia Johnson

26. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

28. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

29. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

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

— Sonia Johnson

31. “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

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

— Sonia Johnson

33. “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.”

— Sonia Johnson

34. “Every time we lobbied them for the right to choose whether or not we will have children, we acknowledged that men owned us.”

— Sonia Johnson