Gloria Steinem Quotes

The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.

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

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

Men should think twice before making widowhood women's only path to power.

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.

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

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

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

so whatever you want to do, just do it...Making a damn fool of yourself is absolutely essential.

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 . . . She will need her sisterhood.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

We are becoming the men we wanted to marry

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

You're always the person you were when you were born," she says impatiently. "You just keep finding new ways to express it.

A liberated woman is one who has sex before marriage and a job after.

I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.

Empathy is the most radical of human emotions.

A woman reading Playboy feels a little like a Jew reading a Nazi manual.

we are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud

You should write about take no-shit women like me. Girls need to know they can break the rules" p.79

The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn but to unlearn.

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

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

Laughter is a rescue. p.204

As Robin Morgan wrote so wisely, "Hate generalizes, love specifies". That's what makes going on the road so important. It definitely specifies.

If the shoe doesn't fit, must we change the foot?

Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two and those who don't.

One day an army of gray-haired women may quietly take over the Earth!

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

When humans are ranked instead of linked, everyone loses.

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

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

Decisions are best made by the people affected by them.

Rich People plan for three generations Poor people plan for Saturday night

If you find yourself drawn to an event against all logic, go. The universe is telling you something.

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

Also, one of the simplest paths to deep change is for the less powerful to speak as much as they listen, and for the more powerful to listen as much as they speak.

My problem is I can think whatever I think—girl power, solidarity, Gloria Steinem rah rah rah — but I still feel the way I feel. Which is jealous. And pissy about little things.

Dying seems less sad than having lived too little.

Women's total instinct for gambling is satisfied by marriage

We need to remember across generations that there is as much to learn as there is to teach.

I myself cried when I got angry, then became unable to explain why I was angry in the first place. Later I would discover this was endemic among female human beings. Anger is supposed to be "unfeminine" so we suppress it -until it overflows. I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed. My mother paid a high price for caring so much, yet being able to do so little about it. In this way, she led me toward am activist place where she herself could never go.

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

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Self-esteem isn't everything; it's just that there's nothing without it.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

Each others' lives are our best textbooks.

A lot of my generation are living out the un-lived lives of our mothers.

Always ask the turtle.

I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.

No man can call himself liberal, or radical, or even a conservative advocate of fair play, if his work depends in any way on the unpaid or underpaid labor of women at home, or in the office.

If you want people to listen to you, you have to listen to them. If you hope people will change how they live, you have to know how they live. If you want people to see you, you have to sit down with them eye-to-eye.

No wonder studies show that women's intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.

Don't think about making women fit the world -- think about making the world fit women." 

Feminism...is not 'women as victims' but women refusing to be victims.

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.

Happy or Unhappy, families are all mysterious.

I wonder: If you think of someone you love, do you become a little more like them? I would like to think so.

no one ever got radicalized by being grateful

Remember: "For want of a nail, the horseshoe was lost, for want of a horseshoe, the horse was lost, for want of a horse, the battle was lost, for want of a battle, the war was lost." This parable should be the mantra of everyone who thinks her or his vote doesn't count.

This is no simple reform. It really is a revolution. Sex and race because they are easy and visible differences have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends. We are talking about a society in which there will be no roles other than those chosen or those earned. We are really talking about humanism.

Altogether, if I'd been looking at nothing but the media all these years, I would be a much more discouraged person-especially given the notion that only conflict is news, and that objectivity means being evenhandedly negative.

Long before all these divisions were opened between home and the road, betweens a woman's place and a man's world, humans followed the crops, the seasons, traveling with their families, our companions, animals, our tents. We built campfires and moved from place to place. This way of traveling is still in our cellular memory. Living things have evolved as travelers, Even migrating birds know that nature doesn't demand a choice between nesting and flight.

The road is messy in the way that real life is messy. It leads us out of denial and into reality, out of theory and into practice, out of caution and into action, out of statistics and into stories—in short, out of our heads and into our hearts.

We might have known sooner that the most reliable predictor of whether a country is violent within itself—or will use military violence against another country—is not poverty, natural resources, religion, or even degree of democracy; it’s violence against females. It normalizes all other violence.

Swiftboating enters the English language as a verb that means attacking strength instead of weakness. In feminist and other social justice contexts, this has long been called trashing, attacking leaders for daring to write, speak, or lead at all. Taking away the good is even more lethal than pointing out the bad. p.189

I didn’t hear words that were accurate, much less prideful. For example, I never once heard the word clitoris. It would be years before I learned that females possessed the only organ in the human body with no function than to feel pleasure. (If such an organ were unique to the male body, can you imagine how much we would hear about it—and what it would be used to justify?)

Nobody cares about feminist academic writing. That's careerism. These poor women in academia have to talk this silly language that nobody can understand in order to be accepted... But I recognize the fact that we have this ridiculous system of tenure, that the whole thrust of academia is one that values education, in my opinion, in inverse ratio to its usefulness—and what you write in inverse relationship to its understandability. [...] Academics are forced to write in language no one can understand so that they get tenure. They have to say 'discourse', not 'talk'. Knowledge that is not accessible is not helpful.

It still would be years before I understood the seriousness of my change of view. Much later, I recognized it in "Revolution," the essay of Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who describes the moment when a man on the edge of a crowd looks back defiantly at a policeman — and when that policeman senses a sudden refusal to accept his defining gaze — as the imperceptible moment in which rebellion is born. "All books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people," Kapuscinski writes. "They should begin with a psychological chapter — one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process — sometimes accomplished in an instant, like a shock — demands to be illustrated. Man gets rid of fear and feel free. Without that, there would be no revolution.