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| Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse the photo of Virginia Woolf (née Stephen); Robert Bridges by Lady Ottoline Morrell Vintage snapshot print, 26 June 1926- Cortesía de 'I Love Virginia Woolf'. |
"But to make ideas effective, we must be able to fire them off. We must put them into action. And the hornet in the sky rouses another hornet in the mind. There was one zooming in THE TIMES this moming — a woman’s voice saying, “Women have not a word to say in politics.” There is no woman in the Cabinet; nor in any responsible post. All the idea makers who are in a position to make ideas effective are men. That is a thought that damps thinking, and encourages irresponsibility. Why not bury the head in the pillow, plug the ears, and cease this futile activity of idea-making? Because there are other tables besides officer tables and conference tables. Are we not leaving the young Englishman without a weapon that might be of value to him if we give up private thinking, tea-table thinking, because it seems useless? Are we not stressing our disability because our ability exposes us perhaps to abuse, perhaps to contempt?
“I will not cease from mental fight,” Blake wrote. Mental fight means thinking against the current, not with it."
-Virginia Woolf, "Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid" (Written in August 1940, for an American symposium on current matters concerning women).
