Gloria Steinem Quotes

If you're raised in a house where it's okay for one group to eat and another to cook, or for one group to get more education money than the other or to be more free than the other, or where one parent gives in to the will of the other or may be verbally or even physically abused by the other. This gives you an idea of human worth.

I do think it's important that there are feminist publications that are not dependent or only marginally dependent on advertising.

The dogma is that that dogma is a mistake.

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

Sadomasochiasm - which we know very well doesn't exist in societies that don't have child abuse - is regarded some sort of natural sexual expression.

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.

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.

I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.

learning must travel the distance from head to heart.

The idea that women don't smell fine on our own is a problem.

... if you're a woman, all they can think about your relationship with a politician is that you're either sleeping with him or advising him about clothes.

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.

If you can learn to like how you look, and not the way you think you look, it can set you free.

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.

You're afraid to be close to women. Because it's not masculine to be close to women. The last time you were close to a woman, you were a child.

I always thought that "humanist" was a good word long before I understood that anyone thought it was a bad word.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

Clinging to the past is the problem. Embracing change is the answer.

Writing keeps me from believing everything I read.

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

I'm still the same person who grew up mostly in a Midwestern, factory-working neighborhood where talk about "self-esteem" would have seemed like a luxury.

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.

I just think that culturally, women - we're all human beings - but at least we don't have our masculinity to prove.

I can't mate in captivity.

For me, writing is the only thing that passes the three tests of metier: (1) when I'm doing it, I don't feel that I should be doing something else instead: (2) it produces a sense of accomplishment and, nce in a while, pride; and (3) it's frightening.

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 mean, you can compel fear, as we know. You can compel love, actually, if somebody is isolated and dependent — it’s like the Stockholm syndrome. But you can’t compel laughter. It happens when two things come together and make a third unexpectedly. It happens when you learn something, too.

[on sexual politics] The Golden Rule works for men as written, but for women it should go the other way around. We need to do unto ourselves as we do unto others.

I was not considered beautiful before I was a feminist. I was a pretty girl before, but suddenly, after I was publicly identified as a feminist, I was beautiful. So, many people were really commenting on what they thought feminists looked like.

It's going to take a while because for the last 500 years patriarchal societies have been devoted to controlling reproduction and that means controlling women. So we got into this masculine/feminine, dominant/passive paradigm, and it's going to take a while to get out.

When you attempt something new, there's always fear. A couple of helpful slogans to me are "follow the fear" or "fear is a sign of growth."

Clearly no one knows what leadership has gone undiscovered in women of all races, and in black and other minority men.

In the late '60s, people were saying we need power to, not power over. Power to do, accomplish, create, not power over other people.

For the reader who has put away comic books, but isn't yet ready for editorials in the Daily News.

Her searches after knowledge were arbitrary and without context. It was as if she were shining a small flashlight of curiosity into the dark room of the world.

I can't tell the difference between my work life and my private life - it's all the same to me.

I can only tell you the kind of power I want, which is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do. Persuade assumes that the other person is going to make the decision. Especially as a writer and an activist, I want the power to put ideas and possibilities out there, but I understand that they will only work if they are freely chosen, so I don't want the power to dictate or to force the choice, ever.

We feel very celebratory and positive that we have created a voyage across the DMZ in peace and reconciliation that was said to be impossible.

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.

No, I'll take responsibility for my own life, I am going to make a decision. And you know, to this day, I would raise flags on all public buildings to celebrate the chance I had to make that decision.

Society certainly encourages women to be victims in every way. I mean if we want approval, we have to sing the blues, even as singers we sing the blues.

We move away from only the binary boxes of "masculine" or "feminine" and begin to live along the full human continuum of identity and expression.

If you let Barnum & Bailey interpret a plot by Stendahl, it might come out to be something like the 1972 Democratic convention.

I think we spend a lot of time denying our mothers. We understand other women earlier than we understand our mothers because we're trying so hard to say, "I'm not going to be like my mother" that we blame her for her condition. If we didn't blame her for her condition, we would have to admit that it could happen to us, too. I spent a long time doing that, thinking that my mother's problems were uniquely her fault.

We all know as we travel around this country or around the world that there are huge problems, and also people doing amazing things on the ground - but those people rarely get reported. Our media are so into conflict that they sometimes say to me, "Bring an 'anti' with you."

Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. That's their natural and first weapon. She will need her sisterhood.

There's a wonderful cartoon of Reagan in a Western hat and he's saying, "A pregnant woman in every home, a gun in every holster. Make America a man again." That sums up his attitudes: pro-military, anti-equality, pro-rich, anti-poor.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.