Gloria Steinem Quotes

It would help not to treat age as if it were any less of a pleasure than it was when we were six and saying, 'I'm six and a half.' You know, we could be saying, 'I'm fifty and a half' and say it with joy. Each age is different and has different discoveries and pleasures.

If you really want to be lonely, get married.

Patriarchy 101 would have you believe otherwise, but you know - that's just not true. Those inequalities are recipes for resentment. And, yes, the formula isn't perfect yet. We don't all have that. But we're trying.

I don't know Beyoncé, but I have the impression that she's sincere, that she really is a feminist and wanted to put the word out there to make it a good word in a big way by putting it in big letters on the stage, and especially because she was quoting the African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who said, "We should all be feminists." She's a very accomplished and important novelist.

I think of the future in two ways - survival plus moving forward. Under survival, I would put all the efforts to save the female half of the world from violence directed at us specifically because we are female.

I definitely think men can be leaders. I see an analogy in the case of what helped me think about racism, which was to find parallels with sexism. In other words, I don't think I was such a great ally until I got mad on my own behalf.

[Erotica] contains the idea of love, positive choice, and the yearning for a particular person.

There were never that many women stand-up comics in the past because the power to make people laugh is also a power that gets people upset.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

There's no emotion more revolutionary than empathy.

The uncomfortable truth seems to be that the amount of talk by women has been measured less against the amount of men's talk than against the expectation of female silence.

If we were going to address what involves the biggest number of women, reproductive freedom is a fundamental human right - like freedom of speech, the most basic right. Freedom from violence, since women worldwide are still like 70% at least of all victims of violence. Equality in the family, democracy in the family, since the family is the microcosm of everything else, so if you have inequality and violence in the family, it normalizes it in the street, for foreign policy, for every place else.

I wasn't ever unable to function, but I did realize at some point that I had built a wall between myself and my childhood by saying, "I'm so glad that's over. Nothing can ever be as bad again," without understanding that my childhood was still very much with me.

Helping begins with listening.

I once fell in love with a man only because we both belonged to that large and secret club of children who had "crazy mothers." We traded stories of the shameless houses to which we could never invite our friends.

The surest way to be alone is to get married.

One of the main problems of our time is that men are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called feminine, and women are deprived of their human qualities that are wrongly called masculine.

Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.

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.

Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power.

We need to raise our sons more like our daughters. We need to relieve them of this burden of the idea that to be masculine they have to be superior, which is what they get addicted to, and why both racism and sexism are crimes that I call superiority crimes.

Intelligence without character is a dangerous thing.

the new women in politics seem to be saying that we already know how to lose, thank you very much. Now we want to learn how to win.

There's really a shortage of good freelance writers. ... There are a lot of talented people who are very erratic, so either they don't turn it in or they turn it in and it's rotten; it's amazing. Somebody who's even maybe not all that terrific but who is dependable, who will turn in a publishable piece more or less on time, can really do very well.

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.

The first problem for all of us, men and woman, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We are filled with the popular wisdom of several centuries just past, and we are terrified to give it up. Patriotism means obedience, age means wisdom, woman means submission, black means inferior: these are preconceptions imbedded so deeply in our thinking that we honestly may not know that they are there.

we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud

If women could sleep their way to the top, there'd be a lot more women at the top.

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.

The highest use of the Web is getting the information and identifying the places and the possibility of being together physically.

There is always one true inner voice. Trust it.

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.

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.

We'll only really know we've succeeded when a mediocre woman does as well as a mediocre man. You shouldn't have to be extraordinary. That's the point!

To punish the individual for the sins of the system makes no sense. We're responsible for changing it, yes. But we can't actually invent another universe, so we have to start where we are.

no one ever got radicalized by being grateful

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 deepest change begins with men raising children as much as women do and women being equal actors in the world outside the home.

A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

Transformation happens in small groups. Each person can speak and all listen.

If you look at many of the women who find themselves with cold, distant, difficult, cruel men, it's because they had cold, distant, difficult, cruel fathers who made them feel that there was no alternative or, at a minimum, who made them choose someone like their father in order to change in this other man what they couldn't change in their fathers.

The most obvious ones inspiring me are probably women in political life. There are also many women in artistic endeavors, but if they're painters, you don't necessarily see them, or if they're actors, you see the role they're playing. In political life, you see women of enormous courage and smarts and humor, and that releases the talent, especially in little girls who are watching.

Reporters immediately push their interviewees into the most extreme version by saying in a shocked tone, 'Well, are you saying that ..." They're trying to make people be as hostile and opposed to each other as possible because they think only conflict is news.

I think I've wasted some of my time, but used most of it well, and have realized that my life is not separate from other people's lives or from the universe. I think our moments of happiness really come from a feeling of unity.

Women can be vivacious. We are allowed more varieties of facial expression and gestures. Men must be rocklike.

Men, through no fault of theirs, get born into cultures that tell them that if a woman can do it, it's not worth doing, or if they're not superior to women in one way or another, they're not really masculine.

Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself... The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.

The point of the journey is not just healing. It's also recovering the truest, most spontaneous, joyful, and creative core of ourselves.