Gloria Steinem Quotes

In every century, there are a handful of writers who help the human race to evolve. Andrea is one of them.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't.

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.

If I read the word 'problematize' one more time, I'm going to vomit.

It's the biggest economic influence in a woman's life whether she can decide when and whether to have children or not.

What we're told about this country is way too limited by generalities, sound bites, and even the supposedly enlightened idea that there are two sides to every question. In fact, many questions have three or seven or a dozen sides.

Women used to be elected only when their husbands died and they became widows. The men found this was too hard on them. That's why they've become feminists.

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money.

Just when you thought multi-nationals and crazed consumerism were too big to fight, along comes Naomi Klein with facts, spirit, and news of successful fighters already out there. No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice, or the universe.

The Miss America Pageant reinforces a belief that women are merely how they look and how they please.

the Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools - plus the doctrine of papal infallibility - so they traded. Also,

I'm also now immune to politicians who say, "I've traveled the length and breadth of this great land, and I know ... " I've traveled more than any of them, and I don't know.

The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

Worry less about solutions from the top or the idea that there is a solution, but try to do whatever you can and instill in each action the values that you want to result.

More than a third of all the men, women, and children on this march perished from cold, starvation, and disease. Thanks to President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, Cherokee land was left to white farmers who used it to grow cotton with slave labor and to mine gold.

Change starts at the bottom. I think we're disempowered by the idea that it starts at the top, when really change is like a tree. It does start at the bottom.

It's especially ridiculous to think you have to be successful when you're so young. You should be able to adventure and not worry so much about achievement.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Anything being perceived as being superior takes the noun. And everything that isn't, that's judged to be inferior, requires an adjective. So there are black novelists and novelists. There are women physicians and physicians. Male nurses and nurses.

There is bias and sexism everywhere, just like there are problems of racism and homophobia stemming from the whole notion that we're arranged in a hierarchy, that we're ranked rather than linked.

I think if we could raise one generation of kids without violence and shaming, we don't know what might be possible.

We need to stop raising boys to think that they need to prove their masculinity by being controlling or by not showing emotion or by not being little girls.

I did not see any way that I could possibly give birth to someone else and also give birth to myself. Far from feeling guilty, it was the first time that I had taken responsibility for my own life.

And I was angry because the media took racism seriously - or pretended to - but with sexism, they rarely bothered even to pretend.

Punished people sometimes pass punishment downward, especially to members of their own devalued group.

Most American children suffer too much mother and too little father.

I think one of the great innovations of sexual harassment law was that it did not use the word "consent." It used the word "welcome."

I remember someone once asked Jack Kennedy why he was paying such close attention to the renovation of the square across from the White House, and he said, 'It may be the only thing my presidency is remembered for.'

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures ... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.

I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things - writing and activism - that until then had torn me apart in everyday life.

We need to unlearn our respect for education, since it has undermined our respect for ourselves. It's worth taking time to demistify it. [...] All the things an adolescent can be [...] are reduced to a three digit number. [...] We too can decide how to value our education instead of letting them value us.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way.

Rich People plan for three generations
Poor people plan for Saturday night

No matter how hard I worked, whatever I accomplished was attributed to my looks. If you're working your ass off, then you don't want to be told that you only got whatever because of the way you look. It takes the heart out of you.

I think we acquire habits of mind when we're little, and I lived in the future because I was always imagining being a grown-up, when I could get out.

At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

You do have all five sense when you're in a room together. You communicate and understand each other in a much deeper way. It is a different form of communication from writing or being on the web.

Obviously there is no such thing as race, and in many ways, sex is a continuum, not a binary. So it doesn't make sense to label people in that way.

Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.

Filters let in a cup of water," he says, "but keep out the ocean.

Mama grizzlies mate later than other bears. They have two cubs instead of four. They wait four years - about twice as long as other bears - between having cubs. And after they're pregnant, if winter is hard or their health is not good or the food supply is uncertain, they re-absorb the embryo into their body.

No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.

There is a quality about Bev that evokes a Zen master. She says things that would seem too simple, were they not coming from someone who has earned the right to say them. No one could have worked harder toward a goal; yet about her unfair defeat, she said, "In the end, it's better to feel at peace with yourself." No one could have created more whole-body transformations over the course of a decade - changes she literally had to eat, sleep, and breathe every day - yet after being denied recognition in what would have been an especially humiliating way for most women, she remained philosophical.

Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.

What would happen if we listened to children as much as we talked to them?

Now, we are becoming the men we wanted to marry. Once, women were trained to marry a doctor, not be one.

Wherever I go, bookstores are still the closest thing to a town square.

In a way, women are a psychic immigrant group.

I'm more often confronted by women who come from religious traditions and don't feel that they have a place in the feminist movement. I've felt pressure when reporters asked me, "Do you believe in God?" I do say, "No. I believe in people."

Members of a powerful group are raised to believe (however illogically) that whatever affects it will also affect them. On theother hand, members of less powerful groups are raised to believe (however illogically) that each individual can escape the group's fate. Thus, cohesion is encouraged on the one hand, and disunity is fostered on the other.

Now we know that women can do what men can do ... , but we don't know that men can do what women can do.

Before she leaves, my new friend tells me to look out of the big picture window at the parking lot.

"See that purple Harley out there - that big gorgeous one? That's mine. I used to ride behind my husband, and never took the road on my own. Then after the kids were grown, I put my foot down. It was hard, but we finally got to be partners. Now he says he likes it better this way. He doesn't have to worry about his bike breaking down or getting a heart attach and totaling us both. I even put 'Ms.' on my license plate - and you should see my grandkids' faces when Grandma rides up on her purple Harley!"

On my own again, I look out at the barren sand and tortured rocks of the Badlands, stretching for miles. I've walked there, and I know that, close up, the barren sand reveals layers of pale rose and beige and cream, and the rocks turn out to have intricate womblike openings. Even in the distant cliffs, caves of rescue appear.

What seems to be one thing from a distance is very different close up.

I tell you this story because it's the kind of lesson that can be learned only on the road. And also because I've come to believe that, inside, each of us has a purple motorcycle.

We have only to discover it - and ride.

A person who has experienced something is almost always far more expert on it than are the experts.

Power can be taken, but not given. The process of the taking is empowerment in itself.

Women are always saying,"We can do anything that men can do." But Men should be saying,"We can do anything that women can do.

I feel that the people I see in the media are sometimes more real than I am, which is utter bullshit.

Never having seen women play chess, they assumed this game wasn't for them and without even a female teacher as role model, they dropped out.

There's going to be a demand for perfectionism on the part of Hillary Clinton, or any other pro-equality woman candidate, that would not be made of men. There are going to be attacks based on different standards of morality and different standards of dress and physical attractiveness.

When she visited me in New York during her sixties and seventies, she always told taxi drivers that she was eighty years old ("so they will tell me how young I look"), and convinced theater ticket sellers that she had difficulty in hearing long before she really did ("so they'll give us seats in the front row").

When I was little, I knew that I was not adopted, but I actually imagined and hoped that I was - and that my real parents were going to come get me.

We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.

You never know which thing you do is going to turn out to be important. I'm sure we've all done very small things that had very great impact and very big things that didn't make any difference. So, create the means that best reflect the ends we want. Try to make each moment authentic, and you'll get to an authentic end.

Feminism is memory.

No one ever got radicalized by being grateful

When people ask me why I still have hope and energy after all these years, I always say: Because I travel.

Human beings are communal beings and we can't exist or prosper by ourselves. We need each other's support.

if I had to name the most important discovery of my life, it would be the portable community of talking circles; groups that gather with all five senses, and allow consciousness to change.

You are the leader you've been waiting for.

Roots cannot exist without flowers, but no flower can exist without roots.

It's obviously a great sign of growth and success that the media no longer try to embody the bigness and diversity of the women's movement in one person. Only a diverse group can symbolize a movement.

Artists strive to free this true and spontaneous self in their work. Creativity, meditation are ways of freeing an inner voice.

You know there is a person inside every baby, right? And anybody who has ever met a baby knows there is already a person in there.

Laughter is the only free emotion-the only one that can't be compelled.p.181

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

hope is a form of planning.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?

The Internet is an almost miraculous way of getting information, of finding and organizing with each other, both minutely and globally. A million times better than the phone and the mimeograph! Also much better than TV, which is one-way and passive.

Women must have seats at the table because peace is too crucial to be left only to the politicians or only to the male half of our world.

Now, we've made the revolutionary discovery that children have two parents. A decade ago even the kindly Dr. Spock held mothers solely responsible for children.

Women still average much less in earnings over a lifetime than men do and have to pay back the same college debt.

All biographers, no matter how sympathetic, end up using their subjects as mirrors to figure themselves out. I don't want to be anyone's mirror.

Men embody adventure, women embody hearth and home, and that has been pretty much it.
Even as a child, I noticed that Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz spent her entire time trying to get back home to Kansas, and Alice in Wonderland dreamed her long adventure, then woke up just in time for tea.

I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

People now ask me if I'm passing the torch. I always explain that no, I'm keeping my torch, thank you very much. And I'm using it to light the torches of others.

Because the truth is that the old image of one person with a torch is part of the problem, not the solution. We each need a torch if we are to see where we're going.

And together, we create so much more light.

I think Hefner himself wants to go down in history as a person of sophistication and glamour. But the last person I would want to go down in history as is Hugh Hefner.

Before feminism, work was largely defined as what men did or would do. Thus, a working woman was someone who labored outside the home for money, masculine-style.

Do women compete for the favours of men? Yes. They've spent 5,000 years competing.

During World War II, a few years after Norma Jeane's time in an orphanage, thousands of children were evacuated from the air raids and poor rations of London during the Blitz, and placed with volunteer families or group homes in the English countryside or even in other countries. It was only postwar studies comparing these children to others left behind that opened the eyes of many experts to the damage caused by emotional neglect. In spite of living in bombed-out ruins and constant fear of attack, the children who had been left with their mothers and families tended to fare better than those who had been evacuated to physical safety. Emotional security, continuity, a sense of being loved unconditionally for oneself - all those turn out to be as important to a child's development as all but the most basic food and shelter.

In fact, caucus, a word derived from the Algonquin languages, better reflected the layers of talking circles and the goal of consensus that were at the heart of governance.

But the press, instead of reporting on these shared and often boundary-crossing views as an asset for the Democratic Party - after all, Democratic voters would have to unify around one of these candidates eventually - responded with disappointment and even condescension. They seemed to want newsworthy division. Soon frustrated reporters were creating conflict by turning any millimeter of difference between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama into a mile. Since there was almost none in content, they emphasized ones of form. Clinton was entirely summed up by sex, and Obama was entirely summed up by race. Journalists sounded like sports fans who arrived for a football game and were outraged to find all the players on the same team.

More reliably than anything else on earth, the road will force you to live in the present.

In the words of so many daughters who don't yet know that a female fate is not a personal fault,

It is more rewarding to watch money change the world than watch it accumulate.

Public opinion polls have long proved there is majority support for pretty much every issue that the women's movement has brought up, but those of us, women or men, who identify with feminism are still made to feel isolated, wrong, out of step.

I was rescued by librarians. It was librarians who said 'maybe you would like to read The Hardy Boys as well as Nancy Drew.' It is true for me, as for so many countless others, that librarians saved my life, my internal life.

We have to behave as if everything we do matters. Because it might.

There's no greater gift than thinking that you had some impact on the world, for the better.

Controlling women as the means of reproduction is made even more necessary by any race or caste or class system. It just comes together, it's just like life. And therefore it's not even practical to be a feminist without being anti-racist or against classism. It just doesn't work.

Gender is the remaining caste system that still cuts deep enough, and spreads wide enough, to be confused with the laws of nature. To uncover the difference between what is and what could be, we may need the "Aha!" that comes from exchanging subject for object, the flash of recognition that starts with a smile, the moment of changed viewpoint that turns the world upside down.