Gloria Steinem Quotes

Racism is not real, it's made up, it's cruel, it can be stopped.

Writers - we're a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least, I do.

Whatever the gender of the participants, all pornography including male-male gay pornography is an imitation of the male-female, conqueror-victim paradigm, and almost all of it actually portrays or implies enslaved women and master.

Once we give up searching for approval we often find it easier to earn respect.

More women are becoming the men they wanted to marry, but too few men are becoming the women they wanted to marry. That leaves most women with two jobs, one outside the home and one in it.

I am not now, and never have been, a girlfriend of Henry Kissinger.

A movement happens when people are inspired by somebody, but they do it themselves. You don't wait for someone else. You do it yourself.

I feel this is very much our spiritual and political duty to be part of every peace table, it has often been the case that citizenry -- women and men -- can make progress when it is not possible for the officials to be able to meet at that moment in time.

Many ideas have been transformed by adding one crucial adjective-women's bank, women's music, women's studies, women's caucus. That adjective did more than change a phrase. It implied a lot of new content: child care, flexible work hours, new standards of creditworthiness, new symbolism, new lyrics.

More than poverty, more than degree of education, religion, access to natural resources, even degree of democracy - violence against females is the biggest indicator of whether a country will be violent in itself or be willing to use military violence against another country.

How ever sugarcoated and ambiguous, every form of authoritarianism must start with a belief in some group's greater right to power, whether that right is justified by sex, race, religion or all four.

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

Crime is not the problem of the victim, the victim didn't create the crime.

I don't like debates anyway. I have never debated anyone, I think they're a very masculine form - like an intellectual prizefight. They let you know who the better debater is but they don't really tell you about the issue. It's all heat, but no light.

Proust's tea cake has nothing on one hour in a college dorm.

Inner space is the real frontier.

The origins of violence against women by men are not biological. If that were the case, it would exist in every culture. And it doesn't exist in every culture.

In my own mind, I am still a fat brunette from Toledo, and I always will be.

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

I think my role is as a writer, especially, and then also as a speaker, an organizer, and an entre- preneur of social change. My role isn't to make choices for people-each individual or group needs to do that on their own. But as a writer and a speaker, you can describe possibilities that perhaps haven't been visible before, and aren't in other public dialogues or in the rest of the media. So I suppose I think of myself mainly as an organizer and as someone who describes possibilities.

Just when you thought multi-nationals and crazed consumerism were too big to fight, along comes Naomi Klein with facts, spirit, and news of successful fighters already out there. No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice, or the universe.

When you say something in a wrong group - it will never be right, so you can not say anything wrong, when you don't belong to a group.

No other form of violence is legitimate. It is never acceptable to use violence to solve a problem. Whether personal or political.

That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them.

Given the expectations of society at large, men are generally correct in their assumption that it is important for a woman to have a man. What they do not understand is how pathetically little difference it makes what man.

The problem is that America is still so racist - I guess it's hard to find another word for it ­ - that they still, the press in general and many people, perceive only white women as feminists. They think black women are black.

Anyone who has ever experienced dehumanized life on welfare or any other confidence-shaking dependency knows that a paid job may be preferable to the dole, even when the handout is coming from a family member.

Having someone who looks like us but thinks like them is worse than having no one at all.

I think that part of everybody's success is due to their looks, but it just works in different ways. If you're whatever society calls attractive, then people say that you got ahead because of your looks-especially if you're a woman. If you're whatever society says is not attractive, then they say you got ahead because you're compensating, you couldn't get a man or whatever. So everybody pays the same penalty for the fact that women are assessed for their outsides rather than for what's in our heads and our hearts.

If technology and medicine are used by women to have children or not to have children or to have healthier children - that's one thing. But if it's used to say, 'You're not a real woman unless you have a child, therefore take all these dangerous hormones and have one at 54," then it's another story.

You have no choice but to live in the present, if you're really being open to events and people as they come along.

The most common characteristic of women's history is to be lost and discovered, lost again and rediscovered, lost once more and re-rediscovered - a process of tragic waste and terrible silences that will continue until women's stories are a full and equal part of the human story.

Paradoxically, only journeying backward in time and reentering the home we once knew allows us to go forward to the home we've always wanted.

There is a naive belief that injustice only had to be pointed out in order to be cured.

I think that there is clearly an understanding that the women's market is an important market. It's still often perceived as separate when it's not.

We'll never solve the feminization of power until we solve the masculinity of wealth.

During the first suffragist wave in this nation, women were possessions, like a table or a chair. So violence toward them was quite condoned. The attitude has diminished, but it's still there.

Go out and find your own stories.That is what I want to tell you.

Housewives are dependent creatures who are still children…parasites.

The phenomenon of the woman who's asked what movie she wants to see, and she says, "I don't know. What do you want to see?" It's a tiny version of a big tendency. Women need to say, "This is what I want."

There are many ways of supporting gender equality, from something as simple as paid sick leave and flexible work hours to attributing an economic value to all care-giving, and making that amount tax deductible.

Writing is always harder than talking.

The cleanup costs of polluting a river, injecting pesticides into the ground water, or putting noxious gases into the air have not been figured into the cost of the manufacturing or agribusiness that put them there in the first place. Historically, the economic incentive has been to pollute.

Logic has nothing to do with oppression.

There is no such thing as Superwoman. You cant have everything if you do everything.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Don't worry about your background, whether it's odd or ordinary, use it, build on it.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.