Gloria Steinem Quotes

We need to return and go forward to the understanding that there is God in all living things, not more in men than women, and not more in humans than in nature. To believe otherwise is only an excuse for dominating women and nature.

Hope is a very unruly emotion.

In almost any situation, if you have been the powerful one, which would tend to be men more than women but not always, it's very important to listen as much as you talk. If you have been the less powerful one, it's very important to talk as much as you listen.

The definition of woman's work is shitwork.

When you stand up for yourself and try to be autonomous and self-determining, you're called a lot of names that we all know and that are very common. You may lose your job. You may lose custody of your child. You may be blamed for the failure of your marriage even though it was the man who couldn't tolerate an equal relationship.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

Labeling makes the invisible visible, but it's limiting. Categories are the enemy of connecting. Link, don't rank.

Intelligence in the service of poor instinct is really dangerous.

You can't do it all. No one can have two full-time jobs, have perfect children and cook three meals and be multi-orgasmic 'til dawn ... Superwoman is the adversary of the women's movement.

I continued for too long to do things that I already knew how to do, or to write stories that I was assigned instead of fighting for stories that I couldn't get, or doing ones that I thought were important on my own. The wasting of time is the thing I worry about the most. Because time is all there is.

Pornography is about dominance. Erotica is about mutuality.

We know from many forms of suffering that what is important first is a witness - people want to know that someone else knows what's happening, that they're not alone - and someone who listens to what is needed and tries to help.

Most of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers, because they were not able to become the unique people they were born to be.

Inside each of us is a unique person resulting from millennia of environment and heredity combined in a way that could never happen again and could never have happened before. We aren't blank slates, but we are also communal creatures who are born before our brains are fully developed, so we're very sensitive to our environment. The question is: How to find the support and the circumstances that allow you to express what's inside you?

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Marriage works best for men than women. The two happiest groups are married men and unmarried women.

If you look at the public opinion polls even, support for all the issues, people who self-identify as feminists are as least as many as those who self-identify as Republicans.

As a concept [androgyny] raise[s] anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind.

Why are women raped far away (say, Bosnia) called victims, while those raped nearby (say, a local campus) are playing victim politics?

I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to be treated as an individual.

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.

I spend a lot of time on college campuses, and I don't quite understand where the idea comes from that young women are not moving forward. In fact, statistically, if you look at the public opinion polls, young women are much more supportive of feminism and feminist issues than older women are.

More and more men are raising children or want to be close to their kids. They don't want to just lead work-obsessed lives and end up 50 years later with an engraved watch.

As a profession, freelance writing is notoriously insecure. That's the first argument in its favor. For many reasons, a few of them rational, the thought of knowing exactly what next year's accomplishments, routine, income, and vacation will be - or even what time I have to get up tomorrow morning - has always depressed me.

By the year 2000 we will, I hope, raise our children to believe in human potential, not God.

Feminism isn't whatever you want it to be.

People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it's just too much.

We do what we see and what we're told. If we haven't been raised in a family or in a community where women are treated as full human beings and men don't have to be superior anymore, we continue to think that it's not only natural but inevitable.

Liberation does not come from outside.

If you have two groups of people and you say one is inferior to the other, which is a lie, then the only way to maintain the lie is through violence or the threat of violence.

One of the things I understood from early on was that art was a symbol of systemic inequity.

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.

If men menstruated, they would brag about how much and for how long.

Life after 50 or 60 is itself another country, as different as adolescence is from childhood, or as adulthood is from adolescence - and just as adventurous.

Feminism is not antisexuality. On the contrary. It says that sexuality shouldn't be confused with violence and dominance and that it should be a matter of free choice. It shouldn't be forced on you by economics, including dependence on a husband, or by pressure.

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together.

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

The gender prism is just descending upon us. For instance, when we're girls of nine or 10 we may be climbing trees and saying, "I know what I want. I know what I think." And then suddenly at 11 or 12, the gender role takes hold, and adults tell us, "How clever of you to know what time it is." It happens to boys, too and even sooner - between five and eight. Before that, boys cry and express uncertainty.

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

... the art of politics is to be ahead of your time--about six months will do it. Any more than that, and people forget you were there.

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

I'm not sure that it's up to me to sum up what I've done with it in the past. I'm not sure there's a way of knowing what we have done that is useful or important.

A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

The U.S. has more guns per capita and supplies more guns to the world than any other country. What would be a fistfight without guns turns into dead bodies with them. Families with guns in the house are more likely to shoot themselves accidentally than to shoot any intruder. Women abused by their partners have a five-fold increased risk of being killed when their partner owns a gun. Every three hours, at least one child is wounded or killed by gunfire.

Law and justice are not always the same.

Women well understood how to restrict birth through timing of sexual intercourse, herbs and abortifacients. I suspect the focus on men's control of women as the means of reproduction came later, in the last five percent or so of human history, with the idea of children as property and labor. One needed to have as many as possible, never mind about women's health or mobility or brainpower. Women's freedom was restricted in order to make sure of the paternity and ownership of children.

The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education.

Women have two choices: Either she's a feminist or a masochist.