Riane Eisler

Peace is putting love into action.

Riane Eisler is recognized as one of the most original minds of our time, and has been honored as the only woman among 20 great thinkers. She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies and is best known for her international bestseller The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future

Riane's story begins in Vienna, Austria, where as a small child she and her family had to flee from the Nazis. They emigrated to Cuba and eventually to the U.S. Riane has said that this trauma could have destroyed her, but instead, it led to her life-long quest to understand why horrible things like the Holocaust can happen - and what we can do so they do not happen again. Riane has become an eminent social scientist, attorney, author, and social activist.

Riane has had a powerful response from very diverse groups around the world because her common theme of caring helps people "connect the dots." She is sought after to keynote conferences worldwide, and is a consultant to business and government on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.

Dr. Eisler is the only woman among 20 great thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee selected for inclusion in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees, the Alice Paul ERA Education Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2009 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and is included in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.

Source: Manifest Station, http://www.themanifest-station.com/messengersbio/riane_eisler.html and Riane Eisler, http://www.rianeeisler.com/biography.htm

Quotes from Riane Eisler

• We all need to understand that personal transformation and cultural -- economic and political -- transformation are interconnected. For example, gender relationships, which are tough for people to deal with, are key to whether a society orients to domination or partnership in all its relations.
• Underneath all the complex and seemingly random currents and crosscurrents, is the struggle between two very different ways of relating, of viewing our world and living in it. It is the struggle between two underlying possibilities for relations: the partnership model and the domination model.
• Part of our higher destiny is to put love into action by challenging unjust authority, by truly caring for ourselves, for one another, and our Mother Earth.
• We can't do it by ourselves, but if enough of us do it, we change the cultural climate, and then the leaders follow.
• For most of recorded history, parental violence against children and men's violence against wives was explicitly or implicitly condoned. Those who had the power to prevent and/or punish this violence through religion, law, or custom, openly or tacitly approved it. …..The reason violence against women and children is finally out in the open is that activists have brought it to global attention.