Top 290 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Fonda - Page 2

I was always a courageous woman, capable of confronting governments but not men.

I grew up with a deep belief that wherever our troops fought, they were on the side of the angels.

I find that arduous physical labor can jump-start my thought process.

I'm not sure that I would have become a Christian if I had continued to live in Hollywood because the notion wouldn't have occurred to me.

I love films that make you feel good when you come out and, in my opinion, there's not enough of them these days.

I never was a hippie! I went to India because so many friends like Mia Farrow and the Beatles were going there to discover truth. And so I went and trekked through India by myself, but instead of discovering truth, I wanted to join the Peace Corps.

The only thing I have never known is true intimacy with a man. I absolutely wanted to discover that before dying.

I was so devastated by my second divorce that I had a nervous breakdown.

The reality is sobering: in the United States one in three girls will become pregnant before age 20, totaling more than 750,000 girls per year.

When I was at the age when you were supposed to be glamorous if you were a movie star, I wasn't.

We are living on average today 34 years longer than our great-grandparents did.

It's hard for women at my age in Hollywood, but I'm not discouraged.

Through therapy and a lot of thinking and writing my memoirs, I've been able to use my life as a lesson.

My childhood was influenced by the roles my father played in his movies. Whether Abraham Lincoln or Tom Joad in the 'Grapes of Wrath,' his characters communicated certain values which I try to carry with me to this day.

I feel like when I was an adolescent, and felt so unworthy of love and so empty, I moved outside of myself.

What we view in the media - and who presents it to us - does so much to determine how we think, how we feel about ourselves, and how we view the world.

The bond between a parent and child is the primary bond, the foundation for the rest of the child's life. The presence or absence of this bond determines much about the child's resiliency and what kind of adult they will grow up to be.

I see many more men who are feminist, or at least who have learned about life in the context of feminism.

I know how gratifying it is not only to work in film but to be acknowledged by peers; producing '9 to 5' was an opportunity that I valued precisely because it's so rarely in the hands of women.

I have people in my life who will say, 'Honey, you're trying too hard.' I like being saucy, but I'm 73 and a half. I'm still trying to find my way between matronly and coltishness.

We can no longer waste time and money. Every day, more than 2,000 girls in America, age 15-19, give birth - in the wealthiest, most educated nation in the world! Neither you nor I should accept this statistic.

Emotionality is really easy for me. My father always said that Fondas can cry at a good steak.

The '60s may be idealized in the movie from a cultural point of view, but the decade was all about discord and a big generational split that was very painful.

I think feminism is about the spirit.

Seek women mentors. If you're a businesswoman, look at the TEDx conferences. There's a lot of businesswomen that speak on there. I find them extremely inspiring.

I've done four videos for older people under my new brand, Prime Time, and the missing link was yoga. I'm aiming it for older people - people who have never worked out or who are recovering from a surgery and have to start slow. It's easy, you can't get hurt, it's very doable, and I've done it in ten-minute segments.

I always had a penchant for falling in love. Every time I found myself without a mate, I fell into a state of low-sizzling panic.

I don't want to make a cheap analysis, but when you have, like I did, a father incapable of showing emotion, who spends his life telling you that no one will love you if you aren't perfect, it leaves scars.

We've got to establish a socialistic economic structure that will limit private, profit-oriented businesses.

I finally got it: empower girls and everything changes.

My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American Prisoners.

When you can't remember why you're hurt, that's when you're healed. When you have to work real hard to re-create the pain, and you can't quite get there, that's when you're better.

We are not meant to be perfect; we are meant to be whole

I never wanted to be an actor. My dad was an actor, and he never brought joy home, so I didn't view it as something that I would want to do. But I got fired as a secretary, and then I started studying, I started doing it just to earn money. And it took me a long time to learn to love it. And what I loved was telling a story. I tried to avoid making plays or films that weren't telling a story that I felt was important. I discovered in the process that it makes you more empathic because you have to enter someone else's reality and learn to see through many other people's eyes.

Look what scares you in the face and try to understand it. Empathy is revolutionary.

The more you treat yourself positively, the less you'll want or need to be negative.

Sex and intimacy are not the same: You can have sex all your life and never be intimate with a person. There has to be empathy in the relationship. You have to enjoy seeing through their eyes. When you're with them, you're there and not thinking about what you're gonna do tomorrow.

The glow and energy of the healthy woman is the ultimate beauty, the only beauty that will last.

Women are rising. And I think that's all the violence and war - it could be the last gasp of the patriarchy, actually.

Aging is a staircase - the upward ascension of the human spirit, bringing us into wisdom, wholeness and authenticity. As you may know, the entire world operates on a universal law: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy means that everything in the world, everything, is in a state of decline and decay, the arch. There's only one exception to this universal law, and that is the human spirit, which can continue to evolve upwards.

The most incredible beauty and the most satisfying way of life come from affirming your own uniqueness.

What I learned is, we have to listen to each other, even when we don't agree, even when we think we hate each other. We have to listen to each others narratives. Not interrupt defensively, or with hostility, but really try to open our hearts and listen with empathy. I learned so much from that meeting. It was a very difficult thing to do and it was one of the best things that I ever did in my life. Look what scares you in the face, and try to understand it. Empathy, I have learned, is revolutionary.

Stay curious, keep learning and keep growing. And always strive to be more interested than interesting.

Ultimately we must concern ourselves with pulling out by its roots the decadence that controls our culture, the profit motive that controls our culture.

Eat only when you are hungry-not because it is one o'clock or seven o'clock or whatever.

When you know in your heart why you did something, and you feel and you know that in spite of all the controversy that it was right, doesn't matter.

When I'm in Canada, I feel this is what the world should be like.

I think what's happening in the world - there's nothing more dangerous than a wounded beast, and the patriarchy is wounded.

Perfection is a toxic desire. We are not supposed to be perfect. The challenge is not to be perfect, it's to be whole.

We all, in fact, carry so many people inside us; the only difference is that actors get paid for it, and we sort of spruce it up a bit.

You don’t learn from successes; you don’t learn from awards; you don’t learn from celebrity; you only learn from wounds and scars and mistakes and failures. And that’s the truth.

You're more powerful when talking from your soul.

My greatest asset is that I am constantly changing.

I would like to say something, not just to Vietnam veterans in New England, but to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of the things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm...very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families.

Don't give up. There are lessons to be learned even in the most horrendous pain. And you don't know that when you're young.

As I saw my 60th birthday approaching, I thought,What did 60 mean to me? I figured I'd probably live until I'm about 90, which meant that I was at the beginning of what I call my third act. As an actress, I know how important the third act is. It makes sense of the first and second acts. You can have first and second acts that are interesting, but you don't know what they mean. Then a good third act pulls it all together. And so I knew that, because I sat by my father's side over the long months when he was dying.

Refuse to be afraid that we will no longer be considered attractive and acceptable when we are strong.

If you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees that we would some day become communist. . . . I, a socialist, think that we should strive toward a socialist society, all the way to communism.

Revolution is an act of love; we are the children of revolution, born to be rebels. It runs in our blood.

If you allow yourself, you can become stronger in the very places that you've been broken.