Gloria Steinem Quotes

The premise of most media is that only conflict is newsworthy. And that's just not true. I think for a lot of men, too - certainly for most women - there's enough real conflict without manufacturing it. The media formula is always to have a pro and con, to say there are two sides to any issue, when in fact there may be ten sides.

Allowing women the power to decide when and whether to have children is the only way to solve the 7 billion human load on this planet that threatens to destroy it. Women's equality is also men's survival.

Women, we tend to become whole people by venturing outside of the home, learning to aspire, to achieve, to deal with conflict - all these qualities that are wrongly called masculine.

Logic is in the eye of the logician.

People waste more time waiting for someone to take charge of their lives than they do in any other pursuit.

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.

What has the women’s movement learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s candidacy for vice president? Never get married.

What we experience in our childhoods that comes to seem normal, or even inevitable, is that if you are placed in a hierarchy, you probably are immediately anxious about going further down and you're striving to go further up, so your energies get placed into becoming "more than," or at least not becoming "less than," instead of becoming "part of."

Because I have work to care about, it is possible that I may be less difficult to get along with than other women when the double chins start to form.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

People say, 'Oh, you've sacrificed so much, now's the time to do something for yourself.' I mean, please - that is so wrong. I don't think I've sacrificed one f-king thing.

Someone once asked me why women don't gamble as much as men do and I gave the commonsensical reply that we don't have as much money. That was a true but incomplete answer. In fact, women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage.

The androcentric, patriarchal cultures, whatever you want to call it, are quite new. So, every economic statement should start with reproduction, not production. Every statement for human rights ought to include reproduction as a basic human right, like freedom of speech.

For much of the female half of the world, food is the first signal of our inferiority. It lets us know that our own families may consider female bodies to be less deserving, less needy, less valuable.

The art of being helpful is behaving as if everything we do matters - because we never know which things might.

I think we all have the power to name ourselves. I try to call people what it is they wish to be called. But we can take the sting out of epithets and bad words by using them.

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

They're all qualities wrongly called feminine: attention to detail, patience, empathy. I don't have children, but I was raised as a female to have those qualities because they're perceived as feminine. Until men are raised with those qualities, too, they won't have the full circle of human qualities.

I'm clearly not frightened of flying because I fly all the time, but every once in a while I do, as we all do, think, What if this plane goes down? And I think, Well, if I'm holding the hand of the person sitting next to me, then I'm holding everyone's hand.

The best way for us to cultivate fearlessness in our daughters and other young women is by example.

Nature doesn't move in a straight line, and as part of nature, neither do we.

If what's inside your dreams wasn't already real inside you, you couldn't even dream it.

Each others' lives are our best textbooks.

There's a big gap between public opinion polls and the vote in Washington, in Congress. The majority consciousness has changed, and often that has made very clear, practical changes in our daily lives, but the centers of power are still not occupied, for the most part, by this new consciousness.

There's no such thing as post-feminism. It's like saying post-democracy, excuse me, what does that mean? We're nowhere near equality, so the very idea of post-feminism is ridiculous. The same people who 30-40 years ago said the women's movement is not necessary, 'it's going against nature, my wife is not interested' [are] the same people now saying 'well it used to be necessary but not anymore.' The very invention of the word post-feminism is the current form of resistance.

In order to make a choice, you need the power to see there is one.

It turns out that we literally don't empathize unless we're physically present - that the oxytocin, the famous "tend and befriend" hormone is not produced unless we're present with all five senses.

Because when some people are invisible, everyone suffers.

Don't listen to me. Listen to yourself ... People often ask me at this age, 'Who am I passing the torch to?' First of all, I'm not giving up my torch, thank you! I'm using my torch to light other people's torches. ... If we each have a torch, there's a lot more light.

Homemakers work longer and harder than any other class of worker in the United States for less pay, and are the most likely to be replaced by a younger worker.

The same big TV antenna dwarfed each roof, as though life here could only be bearable if lived elsewhere in the imagination.

It doesn't matter where we begin the personal/political circle, but it matters desperately that we complete it.

Whenever one person stands up and says, “Wait a minute, this is wrong,” it helps other people do the same.

If [George] Zimmerman had been arrested for domestic violence, Trayvon Martin might still be alive.

Whatever you want to do,do it now.

This is what forty looks like. We've been lying so long, who would know?

When the gender role starts to descend, boys get into the masculine box.

We will live to see the day that St. Patrick's Cathedral is a child-care center and the pope is no longer a disgrace to the skirt that he has on.

Violence is not inevitable. I mean, the only inevitable form of violence is the kind that we understand, the only legitimate (if there can ever be legitimate violence) and that's self-defense.

Men have to ask, 'How can I combine career and family?'

I have always employed humor, and I think it's absolutely crucial that we do because, among other things, humor is the only free emotion.

I'd just begun to be taken seriously as a freelance writer, but after the Playboy article, I mostly got requests to go underground in some other semi-sexual way. It was so bad that I returned an advance to turn the Playboy article into a paperback, even though I had to borrow the money.

God may be in the details, but the goddess is in the questions. Once we begin to ask them, there's no turning back.

During years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country, I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places and turned away from apartment rentals. All for the clearly stated, sole reason that I am a woman.

Prejudice marks a mental landmine.

I do not like to write - I like to have written.

What would happen if even one generation were raised with respect and without violence?

Feminism starts out being very simple, and it ends up being a world view that questions hierarchy altogether.