Gloria Steinem Quotes

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

Being able to support oneself allows one to choose a marriage out of love and not just economic dependence. It also allows one to risk that marriage.

America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.

... patriarchy creates megapatterns that affect us all--even as we forge different individual choices within them--just as do themegapatterns of nationalism or racism.

Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

Children who have been very sadistically abused over the long-term are able to dissociate, some of them are able to dissociate as a way of surviving and inventing someone to whom this doesn't happen. And so therefore, they invent within themselves different personalities who have life histories of their own. Many people invent an opposite gender personality as well.

I will no longer be referred to as Miss Steinem of Ms. magazine.

Far too many people are looking for the right person, instead of trying to be the right person.

Most books are bought by women.

Self-hatred leads to the need either to dominate or to be dominated.

The power of the state stops at our skins. They can't restrict contraception [or] abortion. They can't take our kidneys. Bodily integrity is a principle.

We all have good instincts unless they're beaten out of us or shamed out of us in childhood.

As an activist, you do find yourself directed more toward public action. But I've always tried to use stories from my own life in my writing for instance. It has always been clear to me that the stories of each other's lives are our best textbooks. Every social justice movement that I know of has come out of people sitting in small groups, telling their life stories, and discovering that other people have shared similar experiences. So, if we've shared many experiences, then it probably has something to do with power or politics, and if we unify and act together, then we can make a change.

I don't want to die saying but, you know? There's so much I want to do, so I want more time.

It's an incredible con job when you think about it, to believe something now in exchange for something after death. Even corporations with their reward systems don't try to make it posthumous.

This is the wisdom: If we bless our bodies, they will bless us.

Obviously, untangling sex from aggression and violence or the threat of it is going to take a very long time. And the process is going to be greatly resisted as a challenge to the very heart of male dominance and male centrality.

I would write about issues and people I met along the way, but not about the process and the life of being on the road.

The political is personal.

When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.

Writing is the only thing that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else.

Show me something that is not transformed by the other half of the human race.

I would put all the efforts to humanize the "masculine" and "feminine" gender roles that are the beginning of a false human hierarchy and normalize race, class and other systems of domination to come.

Men were valued by what they did, women by how they looked and then by what their husbands did, and all of life was arranged (or so we thought) from the outside in.

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.

I believe that art has incredible power.

Severe opposition is a measure of success (because) one inevitable result of winning a majority change in consciousness is a backlash from those forces whose power depended on the old one.

Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.

Everyone is unique and each experience is different.

If you say, I'm for equal pay, that's a reform. But if you say. I'm a feminist, that's a transformation of society.

Women and men are equal human beings.

I believe that transgender people, including those who have transitioned, are living out real, authentic lives. Those lives should be celebrated, not questioned. Their health care decisions should be theirs and theirs alone to make.

Feminism isn't called the longest revolution for nothing.

Knowing About Victoria Woodhull inspires women to be daring, outrageous and creative.

imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

The kind of power I want is the power to persuade. But I do not want the power to tell other people what to do.

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age.

You may very well fall in love with somebody who makes less money, who's younger than you, who weighs less than you.

I would say don't worry about what you should do, do whatever you can. And seek companions with shared values.

If you consider that the gender roles are just political, then what you come to see is that the full circle of human qualities is divided up so that two-thirds are masculine and one-third is feminine. Women are missing more of their human qualities, so you'll find us on the fore-front of trying to change this.

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.

[On gender-rating by insurance companies:] They say the reason they get to charge more is we have children. I would say having children is a socially useful act. Being female is not a preexisting condition.

Unless we include a job as part of every citizen's right to autonomy and personal fulfillment, women will continue to be vulnerable to someone else's idea of what need is.

Women get hit with a double whammy. If they're attractive, they're presumed to have slept their way to the top. If they're unattractive, they are presumed to have chosen a profession because they could not get a man.

A different world can be created or re-created-but not until we stop enshrining the economic values of invisible labor, infinite and obsessive growth, and a slow environmental suicide.

One of our biggest problems in terms of effectiveness is that we have hopes, but our opposition has interests. We measure everything against our hopes, including politicians that we are voting for or choosing amongst. We don't measure up to our hopes ourselves.

From pacifist to terrorist, each person condemns violence - and then adds one cherished case in which it may be justified.

We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.